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K^ '«i^::^^^'^?XJ*^ 'i 

ASHTON 
ROLLINS 
WILLARD 


LIBRARY 

OF    THE 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA. 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 


AaTT 

O*:    THE 


King  Victor  Emmanuel  III 

From  a  recent  portrait  by  Cipriano  Cei,  belonging  to  Queen  Margherita 


THE  LAND 
OF  THE  LATINS 


BY 


ASHTON  ROLLINS  WILLARD 


LONGMANS,  GREEN  AND  CO. 

91  AND  93  Fifth  Avenue,  New  York 

London  &  Bombay 

1902 


Copyright,  1902,  by  Ashton  RoU.ns  Willard 


'*-. Hilt, 


Composition  and  eleBrotyfe  plates  by 

D.  B.  Updike,  The  Merrymount  Press,  Boston 

PressTvork  by  The  University  Press,  Cambridge,  U.  S.  A. 


i^a^oc 

\' 

Wss- 

CONTENTS 

I. 

The  Vatican 

PAGE 

3 

II. 

Palazzo  Ruspoli 

^5 

III. 

The  Races 

Ji 

IV. 

Country  Houses 

77 

V. 

Royal  Homes 

III 

VI. 

The  Theatres 

137 

VII. 

The  Studios 

165 

VIII. 

The  Book-Shops 

191 

IX. 

On  the  Heights 

215 

X. 

By  the  Sea 

243 

LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 


King  Victor  Emmanuel  III 

FRONTISPIECE 

Queen  Margherita                        facing  page   28 

Queen  Elena 

62 

Gardens  of  the  Villa  Lante 

78 

Grounds  of  the  Villa  Torlonia 

AT 

Frascati 

106 

Princes  of  the  House  of  Savoy 

124 

Eleonora  Duse  as  Francesca  da 

Rimini 

150 

One  of  the  Studios 

166 

Giovanni  Verga 

198 

The  Terrace 

216 

The  Outer  Point  at  Antignano 

248 

THE  VATICAN 


CHAPTER  I 
THE  VATICAN 

ATH  O  US  AN  D  people  stood  shoulder  to 
shoulder  in  a  contradted  space  not  large 
enough  to  hold  comfortably  half  that 
number.  There  were  stairs  ahead, — an  intermi- 
nable incline,  barred  off  at  the  foot  by  a  tempo- 
rary gate.  Behind  was  an  interminable  corridor, 
dwindling  like  a  railway  tunnel  to  a  distant  out- 
let or  inlet.  Above  the  heads  of  the  crowd  was 
a  colossal  horse  in  sculpture,  and  on  it  was  a 
human  effigy — a  king  or  an  emperor,  perhaps. 
What  business  had  he  in  this  place? 

If  we  had  been  dropped  down  in  these  strange 
surroundings  by  accident,  we  should  have  guessed 
with  difficulty  where  we  were.  But  we  had  ap- 
proached the  place — as  others  had — laboriously. 
We  had  left  a  distant  hotel  and  threaded  narrow 
streets  and  crossed  squares  and  traversed  bridges 
and  seen  masses  of  memorable  masonry  which  are 
to  be  seen  in  only  one  spot  in  the  world.  Rome 
was  in  the  air.  The  atmosphere  was  saturated  with 
it,  outside,  as  it  was  with  the  damp  of  an  atro- 
ciously damp  and  misty  Roman  March.  And  here 
we  were  in  the  very  heart  of  it — or  just  a  step 
removed.  We  were  in  the  grand  corridor  of  the 

3 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

Vatican,  at  the  foot  of  the  scala  regia^  waiting  to 
be  admitted  to  a  papal  fundion  which  was  about 
to  take  place  above. 

The  crowd  had  all  nationalities  in  it,  and  all 
social  conditions.  Near  us  was  an  Austrian  noble 
who  had  been  prime  minister  and  who  wore  the 
broad  red  and  green  cordon  of  an  imperial  order. 
Beside  him  and  around  him  were  infinitesimal 
peasants  from  Bohemia,  from  Croatia,  from  Tran- 
sylvania, and  other  obscure  and  little  known  re- 
gions of  eastern  Europe.  They  wore  the  coarse 
dress  of  their  class  and  their  faces  showed  the 
brutalizing  effed:  of  their  half-servile  existence. 

The  multitude  had  more  women  in  it  than 
men.  Some  of  them  were  worldly  and  some  of 
them  had  devout  faces.  Some  of  them  were  pre- 
pared to  take  their  turn  in  getting  through  the 
little  gate  which  pierced  the  barrier  in  front  of 
us,  and  some  were  determined  to  be  first  in  the 
procession  at  all  costs.  We  had  been  standing 
there  for  over  an  hour,  and  the  best  places  up- 
stairs would  be  at  the  disposal  of  the  first  comers. 

Within  audible  and  visible  distance  of  us  was 
a  tall  Frenchwoman  with  a  sharp  face  and  hair 
slightly  gray.  Her  immediate  neighbor  in  front 
was  another  lady  of  the  same  nationality,  broad- 
shouldered  and  corpulent. 

The  taller  of  the  two  discussed  her  "tadics'* 
in  audible  tones  with  a  priest  by  her  side.  When 
4 


THE  VATICAN 

the  gate  was  opened  she  should  push, — she  said, 
— with  a  concentration  of  all  her  force,  in  toward 
the  centre,  and  so  get  in  the  line  of  the  wicket. 
As  she  uttered  the  words  she  executed  the  ma- 
noeuvre sketchily,  in  the  direction  of  the  broad 
lady  in  front,  helping  her  imaginary  advance  with 
the  legs  of  a  camp-stool  which  she  carried.  The 
lady  in  front  turned  with  an  expression  of  indig- 
nation on  her  countenance  which  was  so  marked 
as  to  obviously  call  for  some  apology  from  the 
offender. 

"Pardon,  madame,"  said  the  sharp-faced  indi- 
vidual. "I  did  not  see  you.** 

"Mais,  mademoiselle,**  replied  the  injured 
person,  "your  vision  must  be  extremely  short.** 

"I  was  pushed  from  behind,  madame,**  said 
the  first  speaker,  with  a  slight  trace  of  acid  in 
her  tone. 

"Excuse  me,  mademoiselle,**  said  the  stout 
lady  in  accents  of  growing  warmth,  "but  just  now 
you  were  speaking  of  your  'tadics.*** 

"  My  conversation  was  not  addressed  to  you, 
madame,**  returned  the  thin  person  in  still  more 
acid  tones. 

"But  we  all  have  ears,  mademoiselle,**  insisted 
the  corpulent  individual,  embracing  the  people 
around  her  with  a  revolving  look  in  which  she 
seemed  to  appeal  to  them  for  confirmation  of  her 
statement. 

5 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

Several  persons  in  the  vicinity  of  the  two 
speakers  echoed  her  remark  audibly.  It  was  clear 
where  the  general  sympathy  lay. 

"  I  shall  seek  a  more  agreeable  neighborhood, 
madame,"  said  the  convided  person,  drawing 
herself  up  with  an  air  of  injured  innocence. 

"Do  by  all  means,  mademoiselle,"  said  the 
broad  lady  in  a  satirical  tone.  "  Ne  tardez  pas,  je 
vous  en  prie." 

The  tall  woman  worked  her  way  around  to 
our  left  in  a  slightly  advancing  curve,  and  gained 
a  new  position,  still  within  our  hearing.  In  some 
extraordinary  way,  after  she  had  been  there  for 
a  few  minutes,  her  camp-stool  came  in  contad 
with  the  back  of  a  tall  and  courtly  gentleman, 
with  a  white  mustache,  who  unfortunately  hap- 
pened to  stand  just  in  front  of  her.  The  gentle- 
man turned.  A  fresh  apology  was  demanded,  and 
the  following  dialogue  took  place: 

"Pardon,  monsieur.  I  did  not  see  you." 
"It  is  nothing,  madame.  Do  not  mention  it." 
"I  was  pushed  from  behind,  monsieur." 
"I  assure  you,  madame,  I  noticed  nothing.  I 
was  turning  to  look  for  an  acquaintance  among 
the  people  behind  us." 

"I  am  afraid  to  annoy  you  again,  monsieur. 

If  I  could  pass  you  there  would  be  no  danger." 

"Passez,  passez,  madame,  je  vous  en  prie." 

The  courtly  gentleman  yielded  his  place  with 

6 


THE  VATICAN 

an  expression  of  infinite  politeness,  and  involun- 
tarily passed  his  hand  behind  him  to  the  irri- 
tated spot  in  his  back.  The  gesture  was  noticed 
and  occasioned  a  slight  smile  to  those  who  had 
understood  the  dialogue. 

The  tadician  was  however  in  front.  And  she 
had  not  only  accomplished  her  own  advance  suc- 
cessfully but  had  succeeded  in  keeping  her  sat- 
ellite, the  priest,  at  her  heels.  His  suavity  was 
balm  to  the  wounds  which  she  caused.  He  made 
his  way  after  her  like  a  healing  lotion,  scattering 
his  ^^ pardons''  to  right  and  to  left,  and  maintain- 
ing a  blandness  of  expression  which  was  proof 
against  all  the  frowns  and  all  the  hostile  comments 
aroused  by  his  strenuous  guide. 

Most  of  the  people  in  the  crowd  had  risen 
early  to  gain  the  utmost  possible  advantage  of 
position.  We  had  breakfasted  that  morning  an 
hour  in  advance  of  the  regular  time.  It  had  been 
a  unique  experience,  rising  in  the  semi-darkness 
of  a  gray  March  morning,  and  sitting  down  to 
one's  first  repast  in  the  same  dress  as  the  waiter. 
There  was  nothing  to  do,  however, — in  the  mat- 
ter of  dress, — but  to  conform  to  the  indications 
on  the  tickets  which  had  been  sent  us  for  the 
solemnity.  They  were  in  explicit  terms.  The 
ladies  were  to  be  "in  black  with  black  veils"  and 
the  men  were  to  be  in  abito  nero — which,  accord- 
ing to  the  rules  of  papal  etiquette,  is  construed 

7 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

to  mean  the  conventional  evening  clothes  of 
polite  society. 

The  period  of  waiting  ended  at  last  and  there 
was  a  rush  upon  the  gate  which  carried  us 
through  to  the  other  side  with  a  sudden  and 
memorable  condensation  of  disagreeable  sensa- 
tions. It  was  something,  however,  to  be  beyond 
it  and  alive.  Willingly  or  unwillingly,  there  was 
nothing  to  do  but  to  become  part  and  parcel  of 
the  grotesque  stampede  which  followed. 

Violent  and  startling  incongruities  pressed 
themselves  upon  one's  notice,  even  in  the  midst 
of  the  race.  The  Austrian  prime  minister  was  a 
man  of  sober  and  sedate  years,  but  the  fever  had 
seized  him  with  particular  fury.  The  aged  war- 
horse  was  distancing  the  youngest  colts.  No  one 
seemed  surely  destined  to  arrive  before  him  ex- 
cept the  lean  and  determined  lady  with  the  camp- 
stool.  She  was  of  the  conformation  of  a  racer, 
and  her  spiritual  ardor  was  up  to  the  level  of 
her  fleetness  of  limb.  Her  ecclesiastical  adviser 
had  been  unable  to  keep  pace  with  her  and  was 
toihng  up  the  ascent  some  distance  behind.  We 
were  ourselves  rather  in  the  rear  of  the  company. 
The  stairs  seemed  interminable,  and  when  we 
had  finally  gained  the  top  the  journey  proved 
to  be  not  even  then  at  an  end.  There  was  still 
a  large  anteroom  to  cross  before  the  door  of  the 
Sistine  Chapel  was  finally  reached. 
8 


THE  VATICAN 

At  the  entrance  of  this  holy  place  we  found 
the  multitude  streaming  in  like  the  rabble  at 
the  gate  of  a  bull-ring.  Apparently  nothing  could 
hold  them  in  check,  now  that  the  barricade  at 
which  they  had  so  long  chafed  was  finally  be- 
hind them.  Just  over  the  threshold  of  the  chapel 
we  were  motioned  to  the  right  by  one  of  the 
uniformed  guards,  and  after  mounting  a  short 
flight  of  steep  steps,  found  ourselves  above  the 
heads  of  the  crowd  in  a  temporary  gallery  which 
was  reserved  for  the  few  persons  who  had  been 
fortunate  enough  to  obtain  blue  tickets.  It  was 
the  only  place  in  the  room  which  was  raised 
above  the  floor  level  and  the  only  place  where 
there  were  any  seats. 

The  people  who  had  been  admitted  to  this  re- 
served tribune  were  quite  different,  in  externals 
at  least,  from  those  who  were  swarming  in  be- 
low. They  had  taken  some  pains  to  conform  to 
the  dress  rules,  and  were  all  in  the  sable  habili- 
ments which  the  etiquette  of  the  Vatican  re- 
quires. From  the  feminine  point  of  view  the 
arrangement  of  the  veils  would  doubtless  have 
been  an  interesting  study.  They  seemed  to  be 
put  on  with  all  degrees  of  awkwardness.  Ap- 
parently it  was  necessary  that  the  wearer  should 
have  some  Spanish  blood  in  order  to  infallibly 
reach  a  pidluresque  effedt.  In  general  the  head- 
gear seemed  graceless  and  unbecoming.  The  bru- 

9 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

nettes,  in  particular,  suffered  from  a  superfluity 
of  black,  which  destroyed  their  color  and  turned 
their  faces  into  the  semblance  of  parchment. 

On  the  floor  below  us  the  dress  rules  were  less 
rigidly  observed.  Peasants  who  had  come  from 
a  distance  were  not  expeded  to  comply  with 
them  literally.  It  was  sufficient  if  they  showed 
an  intent  to  appear  in  modest  and  unobtrusive 
raiment.  Other  individuals,  who  might  perfedly 
well  have  observed  the  rules,  allowed  themselves 
strange  liberties.  There  was  a  certain  red  hat — 
not  a  cardinal's — which  stood  out  in  flaming 
scarlet  against  the  generally  sober  coloring  of 
the  crowd  below.  And  one  of  the  gentlemen  in 
this  lower  company  appeared  in  a  golfing  suit 
of  tweed — and  with  a  face  which  matched  it — 
a  face  which  had  Protestantism  of  the  most  rabid 
type  written  upon  it  in  terms  which  the  blindest 
could  not  have  failed  to  read. 

There  was  still  some  time  to  wait  and  plenty 
of  opportunity  to  study  the  surroundings.  The 
tribune  in  which  we  were  seated  was  a  rudely  ex- 
temporized affair,  which  had  been  put  up  just 
for  this  ceremony  and  would  be  removed  when 
it  was  over.  It  was  built  of  unsquared  and  un- 
painted  timbers,  and  the  only  attempt  which  had 
been  made  to  conceal  its  bareness  and  ugliness 
consisted  in  the  hanging  of  a  valance  of  coarse 
drapery  over  the  parapet.  Underneath  this  gal- 

10 


THE  VATICAN 

lery  was  a  dark  pen  into  which  people  had  been 
crowded,  as  into  every  other  portion  of  the  chapel. 
The  sole  advantage  enjoyed  by  the  occupants 
of  this  gloomy  enclosure  was  that  they  would  be 
close  to  His  Holiness  at  his  entrance  and  exit. 
For  the  brief  moment  of  his  transit,  in  and  out, 
they  would  be  nearer  to  him  than  any  one  else  in 
the  place. 

During  the  whole  period  of  waiting  no  one 
glanced  at  the  frescos.  Not  a  head  was  upturned. 
People  were  occupied  in  studying  each  other  and 
in  talking  with  their  neighbors.  The  room  buzzed 
with  gossip.  The  murmur  of  it  came  up  from 
below,  and  was  supplemented  by  the  surmises, 
the  discussions,  and  the  debates  of  the  persons 
immediately  around  us. 

In  the  midst  of  the  inward  push  of  the  mis- 
cellaneous crowd  a  company  of  sailors  from  an 
American  school-ship  in  one  of  the  Italian  ports 
appeared  at  the  doorway.  They  were  led  by  a 
chaplain  and  one  of  them  carried  a  small  Ameri- 
can flag.  It  attraded  the  attention  of  two  gentle- 
men who  sat  beside  us — Sicilians,  if  one  could 
presume  to  judge  from  their  accent.  They  dis- 
cussed in  low  tones  the  probable  nationality  of 
this  little  band,  their  dialogue  running  somewhat 
as  follows: 

"  Who  are  those  young  men  ?  They  are  sailors 
evidently.** 

II 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

"Evidently." 

"  But  what  is  their  nationality  ?  They  carry  a 
flag." 

"Yes.  They  carry  a  flag." 

"But  what  flag  is  it?" 

"I  do  not  know.  It  is  unfamiliar.  The  men 
have  the  ugly  English  faces." 

"  But  the  flag  is  not  English." 

"No.  The  flag  is  not  English." 

"  They  are  too  young  for  ordinary  sailors.They 
are  hardly  more  than  boys.  There  is  a  Danish 
school-ship  in  the  harbor  at  Naples.  They  may 
have  come  from  that." 

"  It  is  true  they  may  have  come  from  that — 
or  some  other.  It  is  a  chaplain  who  leads  them. 
He  is  a  devout  man.  He  has  brought  them  up 
to  see  the  Pope." 

At  such  times  one  breaks  through  the  barrier 
of  one's  natural  reticence  and  speaks  to  strangers. 
Our  vicinity  excused  it.  The  gentlemen  received 
their  instruction  politely,  with  the  natural  good 
breeding  of  Italians.  It  was  evident  that  they 
were  of  a  superior  caste.  It  was  not  merely  their 
dress  but  their  whole  manner  which  proclaimed 
it.  We  judged  them  to  be  father  and  son.  The 
younger  man  was  perhaps  seeing  a  ceremony  in 
the  Sistine  for  the  first  time.  The  elder  of  the 
two  had  evidently  been  there  before. 

While  they  talked  we  watched  the  squad  of 

12 


I 


THE  VATICAN 

sailors  file  up  the  aisle  and  take  the  places  to 
which  they  were  assigned,  in  the  compartment 
near  the  papal  throne.  The  boys  looked  hearty 
and  strong.  They  were  ranged,  by  their  Irish 
chaplain,  beside  a  marble  bench  running  along 
the  wall,  and  at  a  later  stage  of  the  proceedings 
they  stood  upon  it  in  a  long  row  of  tidy  blue, 
where  they  had  a  clear  advantage  for  seeing — 
and  being  seen — over  every  one  else  in  their 
neighborhood. 

A  consultation  of  our  watches  showed  that  the 
moment  for  the  commencement  of  the  function 
must  be  close  at  hand.  The  people  had  surged 
in  below  until  every  inch  of  space  had  become 
filled  with  standing  figures.  No  seats  had  been 
provided,  and  there  would  have  been  room  for 
none.  Even  the  camp-stool  of  the  French  demoi- 
selle must  have  been  useless — but  it  had  served 
its  purpose.  People  leaned  over  the  barrier  along 
the  central  aisle,  and  looked  back,  with  expres- 
sions of  growing  expectancy ,  toward  the  entrance 
door.  The  upper  half  of  the  great  portal  remained 
still  closed — the  lower  half  having  been  deemed 
a  sufficiently  dignified  entrance  for  the  mere  spec- 
tators of  the  ceremony. 

The  guards  took  note  of  something,  invisible 
to  us,  which  was  happening  outside,  and  closed 
the  doors  entirely.  The  audience  had  a  premoni- 
tory tremor.  In  a  moment  more  the  great  valves 

13 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

were  flung  back  to  their  full  height,  leaving  the 
opening  clear  and  free  to  the  very  top. 

Out  in  the  anteroom  the  late  comers  had 
dropped  to  their  knees.  We  could  see  them,  from 
where  we  sat,  but  not  at  that  instant  the  objed 
of  their  devotion.  The  next  moment,  however, 
the  swaying  form,  high  up  on  its  chair,  appeared 
in  the  doorway.  The  face  was  the  pallid  face  which 
everyone  knew.  Instindively  we  found  ourselves 
making  mental  comparisons  with  portraits  and 
photographs.  Every  detail  was  there.  Every  line 
was  in  its  place.  The  color  was  like  parchment, 
slightly  tinged  with  something  warmer  on  the 
cheeks,  brought  there  perhaps  by  the  excitement 
of  the  moment — the  stimulus  of  the  vivats  and 
the  admiring  outcries  in  half  a  dozen  languages 
which  were  flung  at  the  pontiff^  the  moment  he 
appeared.  Above  this  smiling  mouth,  and  out  of 
this  waxen  face,  the  eyes  twinkled  and  sparkled 
and  moved  incessantly.  They  were  keen  and  fox- 
like— the  windows  of  an  acute  intelligence.  And 
at  the  same  time  they  had  a  benevolent  expres- 
sion which  fitted  into  harmony  with  the  historic 
smile. 

The  ensemble  which  these  diff^erent  elements 
made  up  was  one  which  would  impress  itself  upon 
an  observer  anywhere  as  something  unusual.  The 
dominant  idea  which  the  face  conveyed  was  one 
of  intense  spirituality  and  intelledual  force.  The 


THE  VATICAN 

physical  side  of  the  man  seemed  to  be  kept  under, 
and  the  mind  and  intelligence  developed  until 
they  had  absorbed  all  the  strength  of  his  entire 
nature.  Perhaps  I  am  dwelling  too  long  upon  this 
analysis.  There  is  a  temptation  to  do  so  when 
one  is  recalling  one's  first  impressions  of  a  face  so 
notable,  belonging  to  a  personality  so  unique. 

The  procession  passed  us  in  a  few  seconds,  and 
continued  on  its  way  to  the  altar  at  the  farther 
end  of  the  room.  In  the  rush  of  first  impressions, 
the  face  only  remained  distindand  the  accessories 
left  only  a  vague  imprint  of  themselves  on  the 
memory.  One  was  conscious  of  a  confusion  of 
lesser  figures,  and  a  conflagration  of  colors  with 
a  predominance  of  red.  When  the  procession  had 
reached  the  altar  the  chair  was  set  down  and  some 
sort  of  a  religious  fundion  was  commenced.  I  do 
not  dwell  upon  it.  Such  things  call  for  no  descrip- 
tion. Whatever  the  liturgy  of  the  moment  may 
have  been,  it  was  conduced  by  secondary  persons 
and  consisted  largely  of  the  responsive  chant- 
ing with  which  the  frequenters  of  Latin  churches 
soon  become  familiar  and  which  possesses  little 
interest.  It  went  on  interminably.  There  seemed 
to  be  no  end  of  the  monotonous  rhythm.  Our  at- 
tention wandered,  and  we  studied  the  room  again, 
and  the  unique  setting  of  the  scene. 

Suddenly  the  proceedings  were  interrupted  by 
a  voice  of  such  novel  and  peculiar  charader  that 

15 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

it  arrested  our  vagrant  attention  instantly.  We 
looked  in  the  diredion  from  which  it  came  and 
saw  His  Holiness  standing  at  the  altar  all  in 
white.  The  red  cloak  in  which  he  had  entered  the 
chapel  had  been  laid  aside  and  his  slender  figure 
was  clothed  simply  in  the  spotless  soutane  which 
the  Pope  alone,  of  all  the  Latin  clergy,  is  privi- 
leged to  wear.  His  voice  had  a  commanding  and 
assertive  quality  in  it  which  spoke  of  a  life  passed 
in  positions  of  authority.  The  words  which  he 
was  reciting  may  have  been  the  ordinary  Latin 
syllables  of  the  church  ritual,  but  there  was 
something  in  his  manner  of  uttering  them  which 
made  them  seem  widely  different  from  the  Pax 
vobiscum  and  the  Et  cum  spiritu  tuo  of  the  ordi- 
nary priest.  His  bearing  was  also  unusually  dig- 
nified. He  was  not  a  particularly  tall  man,  but 
where  he  stood  on  the  summit  of  the  altar  steps 
he  dominated  the  crowd  and  seemed  much  taller 
than  he  really  was.  His  gestures  and  all  his  move- 
ments were  graceful  and  showed  that,  at  some 
time,  he  must  have  devoted  considerable  atten- 
tion to  details  of  carriage,  bearing,  and  deport- 
ment. Of  course,  in  his  extreme  old  age,  as  we 
saw  him,  these  things  had  become  second  nature 
and  there  was  no  suggestion  of  affedation  about 
them  or  about  him.  After  decades  of  posing  be- 
fore devout  and  adoring  multitudes  he  had  ar- 
rived at  a  point  where  deportment  took  care  of 
i6     . 


THE  VATICAN 

itself  and  where  he  was  not  obliged  to  give  any 
conscious  attention  to  it. 

When  we  could  look  away  from  the  man  who 
was  observed,  and  study  the  observers,  a  variety 
of  mental  attitudes  was  discoverable.  The  psy- 
chical state  of  the  majority  of  the  people  in  the 
standing  crowd  below  was  one  of  simple,  stupid 
devoutness.  They  were  looking  at  a  fetich,  some- 
thing which  had  been  consecrated  with  the  quin- 
tessence of  all  consecrations.  He  was  a  mere  holy 
thing,  a  sort  of  living  relic,  supremely  precious, 
that  was  all.  His  really  remarkable  force  of  char- 
ader,  of  will,  and  of  intelled  was  nothing  to 
them. 

The  moment  of  the  benedidion  approached 
and  every  one  present  prepared  to  kneel — and 
at  the  proper  point  did  kneel — except  a  very 
few  curious  speculators  who  did  not  wish  to  lose 
any  part  of  the  spectacle  and  who  were  back  near 
the  wall  where  their  ad  of  indecorum  would  not 
be  observed.  When  the  culminating  point  of  the 
fundion  had  been  passed,  the  attendants  advanced 
to  cloak  the  papal  figure — as  a  protedion  against 
possible  chill  after  the  exertion  of  standing  and 
speaking — and  to  condud  him  to  a  seat.  It  was 
necessary  that  he  should  formally  receive  some  of 
the  more  important  persons  present,  principally 
the  leaders  of  delegations  of  pilgrims,  and  the 
fortunate  individuals  who  were  thus  given  an  op- 

17 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

portunity  to  approach  him  more  closely  were  led 
up  to  him  in  turn  and  allowed  to  kneel  before  him 
while  he  said  a  word  or  two  to  them  in  a  low  tone. 
We  had  rather  hoped,  as  this  part  of  the  cere- 
mony began,  that  they  would — to  use  the  formal 
phrase  of  the  clerical  journals  —  "be  admitted  to 
the  honor  of  the  foot-kissing."  But  this  special 
grace  was  not  accorded  to  them ;  and  after  they  had 
made  their  obeisance  and  listened  for  an  instant 
to  the  papal  voice  they  withdrew  and  disappeared 
in  the  crowd. 

When  the  presentations  were  at  an  end  the 
porters  in  their  gaudy  liveries  came  forward  to  take 
up  the  papal  chair,  and  in  a  few  seconds  more 
they  had  lifted  it  from  the  floor  and  raised  it  to 
the  height  of  their  shoulders.  The  reappearance 
of  the  benevolent  face  above  the  heads  of  the  crowd 
was  the  signal  for  a  fresh  outburst  of  enthusiasm. 
Ladies  waved  their  handkerchiefs  and  a  chorus 
of  feminine  voices  shouted  "  Viva  il  Papa''  The 
handkerchief-waving  and  the  shouts  were  taken 
up  by  the  men  and  the  scene  became  quite  ex- 
citing. Caught  by  the  general  enthusiasm,  one  of 
the  sailors  called  upon  his  companions  to  give 
three  cheers, — and  the  cheers  went  off  in  trim, 
sharp  explosions  like  volleys  of  musketry.  En- 
couraged by  this  first  success,  three  more  cheers 
were  called  for,  and  then  a  "tiger,"  which  was 
given  with  the  full  force  of  thirty  pairs  of  lungs. 
i8 


THE  VATICAN 

We  looked  at  the  pontiff  on  his  chair  and  ex- 
pected an  immediate  anathema.  Some  dreadful 
thunderbolt  of  the  Church  would  be  exploded 
upon  them  at  once.  Their  sacrilege  would  receive 
some  sudden  and  righteous  punishment.  But 
nothing  of  the  kind  occurred.  His  Holiness  con- 
tinued to  smile.  He  extended  a  long  right  arm 
toward  the  sailors  and  swayed  it  back  and  forth  in 
a  descending  curve  above  their  heads.  The  first 
two  fingers  were  extended,  and  the  others  drawn 
into  the  palm.  It  was  the  gesture  of  St.  Peter — 
the  historic  gesture  of  apostolic  benedidion. 

The  papal  chair  was  carried  along,  in  the  midst 
of  growing  enthusiasm,  to  the  door,  and  set  down 
at  a  point  where  a  covered  sedan-chair  had  been 
brought  in  and  deposited,  to  save  His  Holiness 
from  the  risk  of  a  chill  in  his  transit  through  the 
outer  corridors.  This  brought  him  diredly  under 
our  observation  and  close  to  the  outer  row  of  de- 
vout women  who  were  packed  into  the  dark  pen 
beneath  us.  The  moment  of  the  change  from  the 
open  chair  to  the  closed  one  was  an  important  one 
for  these  long-suffering  ladies  because  it  compelled 
the  objed  of  their  veneration  to  descend  to  the 
chapel  floor  and  brought  him  within  reach  of  their 
tadual  homage.  The  moment  was  one  which  they 
did  not  fail  to  improve  to  the  utmost.  The  instant 
that  the  pontiff's  hand  came  within  their  reach, 
they  seized  it  and  covered  it  with  kisses.  Others 

19 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

behind  them  who  could  see  what  was  going  on  and 
what  precious  opportunity  was  being  lost  strug- 
gled to  get  to  the  front.  There  was  something  like 
a  contention  among  them,  bordering  closely  upon 
the  indecorous — if  not  upon  the  ridiculous. 

His  Holiness  endured  it  for  a  few  moments 
with  an  expression  of  saintly  resignation  but  with 
certain  unmistakable  indications  of  inward  re- 
bellion. His  hands  were  pulled  away,  gradually, 
but  with  a  sweet  insistence.  And  when  the  last 
tapering  digit  was  free  he  stepped  into  his  waiting 
sedan-chair  with  a  rapidity  of  movement  which 
left  no  possible  doubts  in  the  mind  of  any  ob- 
server as  to  \yhat  his  real  feelings  were.  The  in- 
stant that  he  had  fairly  taken  his  seat  the  door  of 
the  chair  was  closed  by  the  watchful  attendants ; 
and  in  another  moment  they  had  picked  up  the 
carrying  bars  and  were  swinging  away  with  their 
precious  burden  toward  the  privacy  and  seclu- 
sion of  the  papal  apartments. 

In  the  first  moment  of  readlion  the  public  left 
behind  in  the  chapel  suddenly  remembered  its 
fatigues,  which  for  an  hour  had  been  entirely  for- 
gotten. It  proceeded  to  withdraw,  at  a  slow  pace, 
across  the  outer  hall  and  down  the  stairs.  As  we 
thought  of  the  insane  rush  of  that  first  ascent,  the 
contrast  offered  by  this  super-languid  recessional 
impressed  us  as  something  particularly  ludicrous. 
Down  at  the  exit  from  the  lower  corridor  where 

20 


THE  VATICAN 

we  finally  emerged  into  the  open  air  we  found 
whole  battalions  of  public  carriages  drawn  up, 
waiting  to  profit  by  the  home-going  of  the  weary 
multitude.  And  we  were  glad  enough,  after  the 
exertions  and  the  excitements  of  the  forenoon,  to 
surrender  ourselves  to  the  custody  of  one  of  the 
waiting  drivers  and  be  transferred  without  effort 
back  to  our  hotel. 


21 


PALAZZO  RUSPOLI 


CHAPTER  II 
PALAZZO  RUSPOLI 

IT  was  several  days  after  the  incidents  of  the 
Vatican,  and  the  fatigues  of  that  experience 
had  been  forgotten. 

We  were  mounting  the  stairs  of  another  palace 
— a  palace  of  quite  a  different  order.  It  was  not 
an  ecclesiastical  precind.  Its  occupants  had  not 
been  renowned  for  asceticism  or  aggressive  spirit- 
ual virtues. 

At  the  Vatican  we  had  been  excessively  early 
and  by  a  natural  reac5lion  we  were  now  excessively 
late.  The  last  of  the  last  comers  had  apparently 
preceded  us.  The  footmen  were  already  out  on 
the  stairs  extinguishing  the  lights — fatal  sign. 
Roman  economy  suffers  them  to  burn  brilliantly 
until  the  guests  are  all  inside,  and  then  it  blows 
them  out,  save  for  a  glimmer  or  two,  left  to  fur- 
nish a  kindling  spark  at  the  exit  of  the  crowd. 
The  candles  were  too  high  up  to  be  extinguished 
by  ordinary  methods  and  the  men  were  fanning 
them  out  with  newspapers  pleated  into  long  folds. 

Ten  paces  beyond  the  head  of  the  stairs  there 
was  an  anteroom  where  men's  outer  garments 
had  been  stacked  up  into  high  piles;  and  there 
was  a  vision  of  lighter-colored  wraps  towering 

25 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

above  tables  in  another  room  beyond.  In  the 
first  anteroom  a  belated  ambassador  had  paused 
a  moment  to  enlarge  on  the  perils  of  the  check- 
ing-process to  a  small  man  with  two  or  three 
stars  and  crosses  on  his  coat.  He  was  telling  him 
that  at  the  sortie  from  the  last  crush  he  had  ex- 
hibited the  coat  check  which  he  had  received  on 
entering  and  had  been  presented  by  the  indi- 
vidual in  charge  with  a  garment  which  he  had 
never  seen,  which  he  was  far  from  wishing  to 
own,  but  which,  as  it  happened,  bore  conspicu- 
ously the  same  number. 

"Et  le  coquin  insistait  que  c'etait  le  mien," 
continued  his  excellency.  "Comme  si  je  ne  re- 
connaissais  pas  mes  frocs.  II  fallut  fouiller  un 
quart  d*heure  pour  le  trouver.  Prenez  garde, 
due,  car  si  par  hasard  pareille  chose  vous  arri- 
vait,  vous  pourriez  perdre  patience — et  peut- 
etre  aussi  perdre  votre  voiture." 

*'  Et  peut-etre  aussi  mon  pardessus." 

"Par-dessus  le  marche,"  supplemented  the 
ambassador. 

"C'est  une  loterie,ces  numeros.  Voila  tout." 

"C'est  cela  meme." 

The  two  men  moved  on  together  toward  the 
room  beyond,  contending  politely  with  each 
other  as  to  which  should  go  first. 

"Apres  vous,  due,"  said  the  ambassador. 

"Mais  si  votre  excellence  insiste — " 
26 


PALAZZO  RUSPOLI 

"J'insiste." 

I  followed  after  them  with  as  much  haste  as 
was  seemly  and  found  my  companion  already  out 
of  her  domino.  She  was  dominantly  conscious  of 
being  late  and  had  flung  it,  without  waiting  for 
a  check,  on  to  the  first  resting-place.  The  foot- 
men behind  the  improvised  barricade  of  tables 
were  already  hopelessly  swamped.  The  waves  of 
iridescent  fabrics  had  rolled  in  upon  them  be- 
yond their  power  to  stem  the  tide,  and  nothing 
but  their  crimson  faces  remained  visible  above 
the  white  foam  of  chiffon  and  lace  which  capped 
the  summit  of  the  billows. 

The  room  stood  at  an  angle  of  the  house, 
and  looking  straight  ahead  through  the  sequence 
of  doors,  which  as  usual  clung  to  the  window- 
wall,  one  could  see  at  the  end  of  the  suite  a  large 
salon,where  the  lights  burned  brightest,  and  from 
which  the  hoarse  penetrating  noise  of  many  com- 
bating conversations  came  back  to  us  with  dis- 
tindness. 

Over  that  distant  threshold  we  finally  made 
our  way,  but  were  halted  on  the  further  verge 
with  a  sense  of  being  stunned.  It  was  not  the 
room  crowded  full  of  people  which  gave  one  the 
bewildering  sensation,  but  the  figure  of  one  single 
individual,  who  sat  tranquilly  and  modestly  near 
the  door. 

Modestly,  certainly,  and  yet  not  humbly.  She 

27 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

was  up  two  steps,  on  a  platform  covered  with 
red  cloth.  There  was  a  red  canopy  over  her  head, 
and  her  white  satin  feet  were  supported  on  a  red 
and  gilt  cushion.  She  was  garbed  sumptuously, 
perhaps,  but  not  showily.  The  newspapers  the 
next  morning,  when  interrogated  as  to  the  de- 
tails of  Her  Majesty's  appearance,  informed  the 
public  that  she  was  habited  in  pearl-gray;  but 
under  the  gas-light  the  stuff  was  certainly  white 
— great  masses  of  it  laid  about  her  in  softly 
glimmering  folds. 

One  would  say,  if  one  might  presume  to  know 
anything  about  those  minor  matters  which  are 
studied  by  the  attendants  of  queens,  that  these 
folds  had  been  carefully  arranged  so  as  to  ex- 
trad  the  maximum  of  elegance  from  the  rich 
stuffs.  And  at  any  rate,  Majesty,  so  far  as  the 
mere  envelope  was  concerned,  was  completely 
and  satisfyingly  there,  with  all  the  legendary  in- 
cidents of  rich  and  precious  stuffs,  and  softly 
luminous  jewels.  About  her  bare  throat  these 
permanent  bits  of  lustre  were  coiled  and  knotted 
in  rows  and  pendants  and  festoons,  and  just  be- 
low them  was  something  perishable  and  human, 
a  bunch  of  violets  picked  from  some  adual  grow- 
ing plant  that  day, — giving  this  armor  of  dead 
elegance  just  the  right  touch  of  simple  freshness 
and  life. 

On  either  side  of  the  central  figure  in  the  royal 
28 


Queen  Margherita 

From  a  photograph  by  Brogi  of  Florence 


PALAZZO  RUSPOLI 

raiment  were  other  ladies  attired  only  less  sumpt- 
uously. All  those  on  the  right  leaned  left,  and 
all  those  on  the  left  leaned  right,  under  the  in- 
fluence of  a  gravitation  of  which  they  were  prob- 
ably quite  unconscious.  On  a  low  ottoman  at  the 
royal  elbow  sat  a  beautiful  marchioness  who  was 
the  originator  and  creator  of  this  particular  fete, 
and  other  grandes  dames,  including  some  well- 
known  ambassadresses,  were  banked  in  masses 
of  orchidaceous  color  on  the  other  brink  of  the 
little  aisle  through  which  all  who  entered  the 
room  were  obliged  to  pass. 

There  was  a  brief  moment  of  respite,  during 
which  I  could  watch  my  companion  curving  in  a 
backward  droop  before  the  royal  slippers,  before 
it  became  my  turn  to  stand  in  the  same  spot  and 
make  the  corresponding  bow.  The  head  under 
the  diamonds  —  in  those  seconds  in  which  I  ob- 
served it — remained  immovable  until  the  pre- 
cise moment  of  the  droop  and  then  inclined 
slightly  forward,  with  the  mouth  softening  into 
the  suggestion  of  a  smile.  When  we  were  both 
past  the  bowing  point,  and  in  the  midst  of  the 
crush  beyond,  one  thing  remained  dominant  in 
the  mingled  emotions  of  the  moment  of  transit. 
It  was  the  amiability  of  this  queen.  She  had 
learned  perfedly  the  art  of  gracious  condescen- 
sion. She  knew  how  to  be  human  without  ceas- 
ing to  be  regal. 

29 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

The  body  of  the  room  was  filled  with  chairs, 
a  solid  mass  of  them,  with  only  a  thread  of  a 
pathway  in  the  middle  to  make  coming  and  go- 
ing a  possibility.  A  slender  girl,  who  had  assumed 
the  duties  of  usher,  was  walking  up  and  down  this 
pathway,  trying  to  find  seats  for  the  late  comers. 
After  some  searching  two  vacant  places  were  dis- 
covered for  us  near  the  front,  and  we  settled 
down  into  them  in  contented  eclipse.  In  the  ef- 
fort made  to  economize  space  not  an  inch  had 
been  wasted.  The  alternating  men  were  half 
buried  under  the  draperies  which  waved  up  on 
either  side  of  them. 

The  conversation  of  the  people  around  us  was 
alarmingly  audible.  It  was  useless  to  try  not  to 
hear  it.  Just  in  front  of  us  sat  a  fledgling  officer 
in  blue  and  silver,  and  beside  him  was  a  young 
girl  with  a  dog  collar  of  portentous  breadth  around 
her  swan-like  throat.  The  Adonis  in  uniform  was 
unmistakably  Italian.  The  girl  seemed  to  be  Eng- 
lish, though  she  might  possibly  have  been  Ameri- 
can. They  carried  on  an  animated  conversation 
with  each  other  during  the  whole  evening — a 
conversation  couched  in  what  passes  in  Rome 
for  French.  The  girl  was  attended  on  her  other 
side  by  a  mother  or  aunt  who  had  conversational 
interests  in  another  direction  and  paid  very  little 
attention  to  her  special  charge. 

Tableaux  vivants  were  to  be  the  staple  of  the 
30 


PALAZZO  RUSPOLI 

evening's  entertainment,  and  it  was  for  their  more 
convenient  contemplation  that  the  guests  had 
been  squeezed  into  the  ranks  of  chairs.  Over  the 
heads  in  front  of  us  we  could  see  the  improvised 
stage  and  its  accessories.  It  had  the  familiar  look 
of  such  things  the  world  over.  There  was  the 
usual  proscenium  of  painted  canvas,  broad  and 
low.  There  were  the  usual  amateurish  footlights. 
And  there  was  the  usual  expanse  of  ugly  drapery- 
filling  the  awkward  gap  between  the  proscenium 
and  the  walls.  Down  in  front  of  the  stage  was  a 
company  of  black  coats,  with  the  cornet,  flute, 
harp,  sackbut,  and  psaltery — or  their  modern 
equivalents.  The  figure  of  a  well-known  conduc- 
tor, frequently  seen  at  the  Teatro  Costanzi  on 
opera  nights,  occasionally  rose  into  sight  among 
the  musicians,  moved  about  for  a  moment,  and 
then  eclipsed  himself  again  in  some  invisible  seat. 
The  opera,  as  we  learned,  had  been  suspended 
on  this  particular  evening  so  as  not  to  conflid: 
with  the  fete. 

After  a  few  moments  we  noticed  a  significant 
movement  in  the  orchestra.  The  musicians  were 
bending  over' their  music,  and  the  condudor  was 
mounting  his  little  platform  and  about  to  com- 
mence his  harmless  pantomime.  As  the  first  notes 
of  the  overture  floated  out  into  the  room,  the 
conversation  rose  perceptibly  in  pitch.  There  was 
an  audible  consultation  of  programmes.  Certain 

31 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

persons  well  known  in  the  Roman  social  world 
were  going  to  take  part  in  the  tableaux.  It  was 
necessary  to  post  one's  self  and  see  what  was 
coming. 

The  conversation  of  our  neighbors  made  it 
quite  unnecessary  for  us  to  look  at  the  cards 
which  the  usher  had  furnished  us.  "  Regardez  le 
menu,  mademoiselle,"  came  to  us  from  the  direc- 
tion of  the  young  officer  in  front.  "Quel  est  le 
premier  plat?" 

The  swan-like  throat  in  the  zone  of  jewels 
bent  slightly  forward.  The  eyes  above  it  were 
consulting  the  "menu." 

"  Pour  le  premier  plat,  monsieur,  vous  aurez" 
— she  hesitated  for  a  moment — "vous  aurez  Una 
Lettura  d'  Omero*'  She  had  some  difficulty  in  pro- 
nouncing the  ItaHan  words. 

"Un  quoi?"  queried  the  officer  in  a  tone  of 
blank  non-comprehension. 

"A  Reading  from  Homer,"  said  the  girl 
frankly,  not  venturing  to  repeat  the  unpro- 
nounceable syllables.  "C'est  a  dire, —  Une 
LeAure  d'Homere,"  she  continued,  with  an  ex- 
pression of  having  finally  got  her  answer  into 
comprehensible  form. 

"  Let  us  hope  they  will  make  it  short,"  re- 
turned her  companion,  speaking  in  French. 
"These  readings  from  Homer  bore  me.  Homer, 
Virgil,  Cicero — we  have  too  much  of  them 
32 


PALAZZO  RUSPOLI 

here  at  Rome.  For  you  foreigners  they  may  be 
a  novelty,  but  for  us  they  are  the  staple  of  our 
daily  diet." 

"  Don't  be  alarmed,  captain,**  replied  the  girl, 
speaking  in  the  same  language.  "They  will  not 
read  anything." 

"Ah,  mademoiselle,  you  relieve  me.  And  who 
are  going  to  take  part  in  this  little  scene?" 

The  girl  held  the  programme  up  to  her  myopic 
vision  again,  and  proceeded  to  read  the  names 
of  the  figurants.  They  were  all  of  them  taken 
from  the  upper  social  stratum  of  the  local  or  for- 
eign colony.  Two  of  them  were  incipient  ambas- 
sadors, at  that  moment  performing  secondary 
roles  in  the  diplomatic  corps  but  doubtless  des- 
tined to  advance  to  higher  places  later.  There 
was  also  a  marquis  who  was  not  in  diplomacy, 
and  a  prince  who  had  no  other  vocation  than 
supporting  the  dignity  of  his  title.  A  graceful 
girl,  one  of  the  younger  beauties,  was  to  take 
the  one  solitary  feminine  part. 

The  music  ran  its  course  and  came  to  a  stop, 
and  the  curtain  after  certain  premonitory  tremors 
— calculated  to  stimulate  the  impatience  of  the 
audience — gradually  rose.  It  disclosed  a  group 
of  five  persons,  not  oppressively  self-conscious. 
Their  attitudes  were  fortunately  easy  to  main- 
tain. It  was  the  well-known  group  of  the  well- 
known  pidure.  All  of  the  figures,  except  that 

33 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

of  the  Reader,  were  in  positions  of  repose.  One 
of  them  lay  stretched  out  at  full  length  upon 
the  floor.  It  was  only  the  man  with  the  scroll 
who  was  placed  in  a  trying  attitude,  and  he  main- 
tained his  pose  with  a  fair  degree  of  success.  Even 
the  expression  was  appropriately  rendered.  The 
face  seemed  to  be  warmed  by  the  fervor  of  reci- 
tation—  though  it  is  possible  that  the  fervor  of 
paint  was  what  really  conveyed  this  impression 
of  emotional  tension. 

As  the  draperies  slowly  descended  the  general 
verdid  was  that  the  human  elements  in  the  pict- 
ure were  very  well  done.  The  finely  chiselled  faces 
of  the  Latins  who  took  part  gave  an  adequate 
parallel  for  the  old  Greek  faces.  They  made  one 
realize  the  coarseness  and  earthy-ness  of  the 
Saxon  type.  But  the  accessories  fell  far  short  of 
Tademesque  perfection.  The  lyre  was  palpably 
pasteboard.  The  curved  marble  seat  was  pal- 
pably wood.  And  the  blue  line  of  the  JEgea.n, 
which  crosses  the  background  of  the  picture  with 
its  matchless  zone  of  color,  was  simply  lacking 
altogether. 

The  occasion,  however,  was  more  social  than 
artistic  and  it  was  in  bad  taste  to  be  too  critical. 
The  queen  was  applauding  gently,  raising  her 
white  gloves  clearly  into  view  as  she  brought 
them  together.  And  the  rest  of  the  company, 
with  this  safe  precedent  before  them,  allowed 
34 


PALAZZO  RUSPOLI 

themselves  to  express  their  satisfadion  without 
any  restraint.  The  a6tors  all  had  their  admirers 
— their  special  constituencies.  There  were  loud 
demands  for  repetitions,  and  the  curtain  had  to 
be  rolled  up  a  second,  and  even  a  third  time, 
before  the  importunities  of  the  audience  could 
be  satisfied. 

A  baritone  from  the  opera  sang  an  air  from 
Verdi  in  the  interlude  which  followed — usurp- 
ing the  conductor's  little  platform  and  driving 
the  misplaced  diredor  to  a  role  of  obscure  utility 
at  the  piano.  Programmes  were  again  consulted. 
It  was  a  religious  pidure  which  was  to  follow — 
perhaps  a  concession  of  the  programme-makers  to 
the  Lenten  conscience  (for  we  were  in  mid- Lent) 
or  to  that  fragment  and  remnant  of  it  which  still 
subsists  in  the  transformed  Rome. 

When  the  curtain  rose  what  we  saw  was  a  pro- 
cession of  five  figures,  with  three  women  in  ad- 
vance and  two  men  following.  The  women  were 
the  three  Marys.  The  men  were  disciples.  All 
of  them  were  garbed  in  sombre  draperies  and 
were  posed  in  attitudes  intended  to  express  in- 
consolable grief 

The  efFediveness  of  the  pidure,  however,  was 
somewhat  marred  by  certain  incongruities.  One 
could  perhaps  accept  the  reverent  figures  of  the 
women,  but  the  mustached  companions  who  fol- 
lowed them  on  their  holy  pilgrimage  introduced 

35 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

an  element  which  sadly  lowered  the  spiritual 
tone  of  the  ensemble.  The  St.  John  was  a  well- 
known  officer,  famous  for  his  feats  of  horseman- 
ship, the  possessor  of  a  celebrated  animal  which 
had  won  its  own,  and  its  owner's  fame,  by  its 
deerlike  agility  in  getting  over  five-barred  gates. 
One  divined  the  uniform  under  the  sombre  dra- 
peries, and  the  sun-burned  cheek  underneath  the 
cadaverous  paint. 

"M go'-"  exclaimed  the  young  man  in 

front  of  us,  recognizing  his  companion  in  arms 
the  moment  the  curtain  went  up.  "Isn't  he 
sublime!  O  holy  man!" 

The  young  woman  to  whom  he  had  appealed 
raised  her  lorgnon  to  her  face  and  scrutinized  the 
saintly  figure  with  sceptical  eyes  from  head  to  foot. 

"He  is  grotesque,"  she  said,  speaking  slowly. 
"He  is  not  San  Giovanni,  he  is  Don  Giovanni. 
Every  shred  of  him  shrieks  it." 

The  adtors  in  the  little  scene  seemed  to  have 
some  difficulty  in  maintaining  their  expressions, 
and  the  curtain-raiser,  perhaps  noticing  some 
signs  of  embarrassment,  suddenly  lowered  the 
curtain.  It  was  however  promptly  raised  again. 
The  audience  was  insistent  for  a  repetition. 

"Who  is  the  Madonna?"  queried  the  girl. 

"ItisLaSambuy — the  Countess  of  Sambuy." 

"She  is  beautiful.  She  is  almost  good  enough 
to  compensate  for  those  atrocious  officers."    ^_ 

36 


PALAZZO  RUSPOLI 

"  You  are  hard  on  us,  mademoiselle.  But  I  will 
agree  that  the  countess  is  better." 

"You  do  not  say  enough  for  her,  captain." 

"She  is  divine,"  said  the  young  man,  rising 
to  the  emergency.  "One  can  almost  see  the  halo 
about  her  head.  Compassion  plays  around  her 
mouth.  The  very  folds  of  her  draperies  are  an 
expression  of  grief." 

"You  grow  poetical,  captain.  I  did  not  suspedl 
the  vein.  You  should  exchange  your  sword  for 
a  lyre." 

"I  might  do  worse,  mademoiselle.  In  poetry 
I  should  not  have  wholly  failed.  I  should  have 
risen  to  some  rank — " 

"Drum  major,  perhaps!  An  important  role! 
I  think  I  see  you  in  it!" 

"You  are  sarcastic,  mademoiselle.  But  do  not 
speak  too  lightly  of  majors — or  of  drums  either." 

"  Pardon  me,  captain.  I  did  not  mean  to  hurt 
your  feelings." 

"Even  great  men  go  about  with  a  drum  oc- 
casionally," continued  the  officer,  "to  attrad  at- 
tention to  themselves  in  a  humble,  modest  way. 
Battre  la  grosse  caisse,  c'est  un  exercice  que  se 
permettent  quelquefois  les  plus  grands  person- 
nages — les  ministres — les  poetes  meme." 

"I  will  pardon  it  in  ministers,  captain,"  said 
the  girl,  "but  not  in  poets.  The  poet  must  stick 
to  his  lyre." 

37 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

"You  are  severe,  mademoiselle.  Without  at 
least  a  little  advertising  my  poetry  would  hardly 
support  my  family .  I  had  better  hold  to  my  sword." 

"Your  family,"  returned  the  girl,  measuring 
the  young  man,  what  there  was  visible  of  him, 
with  an  up-and-down  look — "your  family — of 
the  future!" 

"Alas,  yes,  mademoiselle.  Malheureusment  je 
n'y  suis  pas  encore.  I  have  not  got  to  that  para- 
dise yet.  I  am  still  a  solitary  man,  a  celibate,  an 
ascetic,  a  recluse." 

A  liquid  glance — well  worth  the  seeing — was 
direded  toward  her,  but  she  refused  to  intercept 
it.  Through  her  ears,  perhaps,  she  divined  the 
look,  and  declined  to  turn.  The  shaft  missed  its 
mark. 

While  the  little  dialogue — which  I  have  given 
only  in  an  imperfed:  approximation — was  in  pro- 
gress the  countess  and  her  companions  had  been 
released  from  their  trying  positions  and  allowed 
to  withdraw  to  the  retiring-room  reserved  for  the 
artists  of  the  occasion.  Somewhere  behind  the 
scenes  the  St.  John  was  probably  solacing  him- 
self with  a  cigarette.  His  halo  was  laid  aside.  He 
would  not  wear  it  again  that  evening. 

The  sequence  of  tableaux  continued  with  al- 
ternating interludes  of  music.  It  brought  us,  just 
before  the  intermission,  to  another  pidure  by 
Alma  Tadema,  which  was  entitled  on  the  pro- 

38 


PALAZZO  RUSPOLI 

gramme  "At  the  Shrine  of  Venus."  In  the  most 
conspicuous  role  was  a  famous  beauty  of  the 
season — foreign,  not  Roman.  She  had  no  title 
but  was  raised  to  a  peerage  by  her  exceptional 
good  looks.  She  had  softly  rounded  features,  a 
pink  and  white  complexion,  and  a  forehead  which 
appeared  never  to  have  been  contradted  by  a  dis- 
quieting thought.  It  was  a  form  of  beauty  which 
reaches  the  acme  of  physical  perfedlion  and  one  to 
which  the  Latin  races  are  particularly  susceptible. 

Heightened  by  the  charm  of  soft  Greek  dra- 
peries it  appealed  on  this  occasion  not  only  to 
the  susceptibilities  of  the  Latins  but  to  those  of 
the  audience  in  general — and  the  gathering  was 
very  cosmopolitan.  The  tributes  of  admiration 
burst  out  in  all  languages  the  moment  the  cur- 
tain rose.  She  was  ausserordentlich  hiibsch,  she 
was  reizend,  she  was  entziickend,  she  was  per- 
fedly  lovely,  she  was  stunning,  she  was  bewitch- 
ing, as  well  as  bella,  simpatica,  charmante,  ravis- 
sante — and  the  rest. 

The  chorus  continued,  and  devel  ped  into 
gossip,  after  the  blank  of  the  commonplace  cur- 
tain had  shut  out  the  vision  of  loveliness.  She 
had  been  seen  here,  there,  everywhere,  during 
the  season,  and  always  with  the  inevitable  nim- 
bus of  admirers  about  her.  Her  box  at  the  opera 
had  been  the  scene  of  a  continual  levee.  At  the 
tea  rooms  on  the  Corso  she  was  so  barricaded 

39 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

with  people  who  wished  to  see  her  that  she  could 
hardly  reach  the  door  or  cross  the  sidewalk  to 
her  carriage.  And  as  for  walking  in  the  streets, 
the  susceptible  population  of  Rome,  it  was  said, 
would  have  made  a  step's  advance  impossible. 

The  conversation  which  raged  on  all  sides  of 
us  helped  to  fill  up  the  gap  of  the  intermission. 
None  of  the  people  moved  from  their  places — 
no  one  could  move.  To  have  dissolved  that  mo- 
saic and  reset  it  again  would  have  been  the  work 
of  hours.  The  queen  had  withdrawn.  She  was  re- 
freshing, or  pretending  to  refresh  herself,  at  the 
buffet ;  but  the  lower  strata  of  the  company  sat 
with  such  contentment  as  was  possible  in  their 
places. 

There  was  time  to  look  about  one  and  inspedl 
the  room,  which  was  one  of  the  famous  meeting- 
places  of  Roman  society.  I^utta  Roma  could  get 
in  and  dance  there,  or  be  seated,  as  the  exigency 
might  require.  It  had  faded  old  frescos  covering 
the  whole  wall  and  climbing  up  on  to  the  ceil- 
ing. Between  the  windows  were  marble  busts  sup- 
ported on  brackets,  which  on  this  occasion  had 
been  utilized  as  supports  for  temporary  eledric 
lights.  The  Edisonian  bulbs  hung  from  loops  of 
wire  thrown  aroundthenecksof  the  dead  worthies 
and  cast  their  faces  into  grotesque  shadows. 

We  speculated  as  to  whom  these  aged  images 
might  represent  and  as  to  which  of  the  several 
40 


PALAZZO  RUSPOLI 

Roman  families,  who  had  in  turn  occupied  the 
palace,  had  the  right  to  claim  them.  The  house 
had  passed  through  various  different  hands  in 
the  three  centuries  of  its  history,  before  it  had 
come  into  the  possession  of  the  Ruspoli — its 
present  owners.  The  busts  might  be  those  of  the 
Rucellai,  the  original  occupants ;  or  of  the  Caetani 
who  followed  them.  The  Caetani  had  inhabited 
the  place  when  a  certain  tragedy  occurred  which 
is  still  remembered  at  Rome.  One  of  the  dukes  had 
been  murdered  by  an  Orsini  on  his  own  thresh- 
old, and  the  entrance  had  never  been  crossed 
again  by  any  member  of  the  vidimus  family  or 
by  the  later  tenants.  They  willingly  endured  the 
inconvenience  of  coming  in  from  the  side  street 
rather  than  plant  their  superstitious  feet  on  that 
trace  of  blood. 

As  we  mentally  reviewed  the  history  of  the 
place  and  listened  to  the  talk  around  us,  the  mo- 
ments of  the  intermission  slipped  by  and  another 
tableau  was  brought  on.  By  chance  it  introduced 
a  Caetani,  one  of  the  sons  of  the  present  duke. 
The  appearance  of  this  young  man  gave  a  touch 
of  fresh  interest  to  the  mouldy  old  tragedy.  Pos- 
sibly there  were  also  Orsini  in  the  room  looking 
on  at  the  descendant  of  their  ancient  enemy,  for 
there  are  still  Orsini  at  Rome.  There  were  other 
notables  in  the  little  group  upon  the  stage, — 
social  celebrities  of  the  moment  whose  names 

41 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

were  sure  to  be  brought  before  the  public  in  some 
connexion  or  other  in  every  issue  of  the  Garnet 
Mondain.  The  tableau  itself  may  not  have  been 
quite  so  successful  as  some  of  the  others,  but 
the  hot  and  weary  people  who  looked  on  from  the 
floor  of  the  great  room  were  glad  to  be  amused 
again  after  the  long  wait  and  accorded  it  a  gener- 
ous measure  of  applause. 

The  queen  had  returned  to  her  place,  during 
the  interval,  and  continued  as  before  to  furnish 
the  perfedt  pidure  of  gracious  serenity  and  com- 
posure. Beside  her  sat  her  mother,  the  Duchess 
of  Genoa — a  striking  figure,  showing  old  age  in 
all  its  physical  beauty  with  none  of  its  external 
signs  of  failure  or  decay.  She  was  arrayed  all  in 
white,  and  the  unity  of  tone  was  sustained  by  the 
abundant  masses  of  her  snow-white  hair.  Her  cos- 
tume was  of  moire,  stiff  as  tapestry,  and  the  har- 
mony of  tint  was  further  carried  out  in  a  collar  of 
ermine  which  partially  covered  her  neck.  There 
were  no  spots  or  blemishes  on  this  immaculate 
toilet,  and  no  contrasts  of  any  kind  except  the 
points  of  black  which  set  off  the  white  of  the  er- 
mine and  the  sprays  of  jet  which  accentuated  the 
beauty  of  her  hair.  She  was  a  superb  figure,  hardly 
less  regal  in  appearance  than  the  real  occupant  of 
the  throne. 

Two  sovereigns  were  introduced  in  the  tableaux 
which  followed,  but  the  young  Romans  who  im- 
42 


PALAZZO  RUSPOLI 

personated  them  played  their  roles  indifferently 
well.  With  the  real  thing  before  one's  eyes  it  was 
easy  to  seethe  shortcomings  of  the  imitation.  Pos- 
sibly one's  sense  of  the  hollowness  of  the  shams 
was  sharpened  by  the  acute  fatigue  from  which 
every  one  was  beginning  to  suffer.  It  was  already 
midnight.  The  air  was  oppressive.  Not  a  breath 
of  fresh  oxygen  had  been  let  into  the  room  for 
hours. 

"I  am  suffocating,"  said  the  girl  in  front  of  us, 
turning  her  head  from  right  to  left,  as  if  seeking 
some  escape  from  the  stifling  atmosphere.  "If  I 
could  only  get  out!" 

"  I  do  not  see  any  way,"  returned  the  young 
man,  taking  a  survey  of  the  crowded  room,  "un- 
less you  try  the  window.  There  is  a  balcony  just 
outside.  And  there  is  the  Corso  below." 

"Thank  you,  captain.  I  fear  the  role  of  Juliette 
would  not  suit  me." 

"On  the  contrary,  mademoiselle,  if  you  will  al- 
low me  to  say  so,  it  would  suit  you  admirably." 

"A  Romeo  would  be  necessary." 

"  Simply  show  yourself  at  the  window,  and  there 
would  be  no  lack  of  them.  I  hear  steps  in  the  street. 
If  need  be,  I  would  jump  down  myself  to  receive 
you.  Je  sauterais  en  bas  moi-meme,  pour  vous  re- 
cevoir." 

"Merci,  monsieur.  Pourles  Romeos  sautes — 
de  cette  altitude — je  n'ai  point  d'appetit." 

43 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

"But  the  distance  is  a  mere  bagatelle,  made- 
moiselle." 

**  Thirty  feet  at  the  very  least,  captain.  Remem- 
ber that  staircase  that  we  came  up — a  mountain 
— a  Mont  Blanc." 

"Ah!  Those  stairs!" 

"Yes,  captain,  those  stairs.  They  were  inter- 
minable. I  thought  we  should  never  get  to  the  top. 
Fortunately  the  descent  will  be  easier." 

"  The  descent,  mademoiselle,  will  be  something 
worth  seeing.  The  people  straggled  up.  They  will 
descend  in  a  body.  It  is  a  sight — a  famous  one. 
You  must  not  miss  it." 

"Indeed?" 

"People  come  here,"  continued  the  officer  in 
a  tone  which  was  not  wholly  serious,  "simply  to 
go  away — sometimes.  I  have  known  them  to  do 
it.  They  arrive  at  the  last  moment  and  do  not  take 
off  their  wraps.  They  come  for  the  sortie  J* 

"You  are  jesting,  monsieur." 

"Parole  d'honneur,  mademoiselle." 

"Then  if  it  is  so  important  as  all  that  I  think 
I  will  stay  to  the  end,"  continued  the  girl,  "in- 
asmuch as  I  cannot  escape  anyway.  This  air  is 
intolerable — but  I  will  resign  myself"  She  set- 
tled back  in  her  chair  with  an  air  of  submitting 
to  the  inevitable,  and  the  conversation  came,  for 
the  moment,  to  a  stop. 

While  the  last  sentences  were  being  uttered  a 
44 


PALAZZO  RUSPOLI 

prima  donna  had  been  making  her  way  between 
the  music  racks  of  the  orchestra  toward  the  con- 
dudor's  platform,  and  presently  became  visible 
at  two-thirds  length  as  she  stepped  up  on  to  the 
little  pedestal.  It  was  one  of  the  younger  sopranos 
who  had  been  singing  the  leading  role  in"  Saffo," 
in  "  La  Boheme,"  and  in  other  recent  produdtions 
at  the  opera.  Her  vocalizing  was  to  fill  the  last 
intermezzo  and  it  filled  it  acceptably.  She  executed 
an  air  from  Gounod  and  another  from  Boito  with 
exquisite  grace.  The  favorable  impression  made 
by  her  singing  was  heightened  by  the  charm  of 
her  personal  appearance.  Her  face  was  fresh  and 
her  figure  girlish.  The  pale  blue  satin  of  her  gown 
suited  her  youthful  look.  The  diamonds  at  her 
throat  sparkled  softly.  The  audience  exchanged 
glances  of  approval  in  the  pauses  of  her  songs 
and  the  whole  room  became  vocal  with  murmurs 
o^^^brava''  as  she  retired. 

During  the  last  tableau  the  queen  had  with- 
drawn unobserved,  attended  only  by  the  persons 
of  her  immediate  suite.  And  upon  the  final  de- 
scent of  the  curtain  every  one  rose.  It  was  an  in- 
finite relief  to  stand,  to  move,  even  though  one 
crawled  at  a  snail's  pace  toward  the  door.  In  the 
cloak-rooms  the  sleepy  attendants  were  suddenly 
plunged  into  a  vortex  of  employment.  The  scene 
was  bewildering.  It  was  like  a  run  on  a  bank.  Out 
in  the  corridor  a  row  of  footmen  had  been  drawn 

45 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

up  with  ladles*  wraps  brought  from  carriages,  and 
the  owners  of  these  garments  had  the  advantage 
of  cloaking  themselves  before  the  rest;  but  there 
their  advantage  ceased.  Nolawofprecedencecould 
get  their  carriages  out  of  the  inextricable  tangle 
in  the  street  below  and  bring  them  to  the  door 
before  their  turn. 

On  the  stairs  the  descent  was  languid.  No  one 
seemed  to  be  in  a  hurry.  From  the  summit  one 
looked  down  upon  a  multi-colored  stream,  filling 
the  space  from  side  to  side  and  moving  with  glacial 
deliberation. 

There  was  much  to  be  discussed.  Acquaintances 
who  had  seen  each  other  dimly  across  a  sea  of  heads 
upstairs  were  now  brought  side  by  side  and  could 
let  loosethe  flood-gates  of  criticism  and  comment. 
From  the  feminine  point  of  view  the  epilogue 
to  the  evening  had  a  further  advantage  in  that  it 
permitted  a  complete  change  of  costume.  The 
elaborate  confedions  which  issued  from  the  cloak- 
rooms in  the  way  of  wraps  were,  if  anything,  more 
sumptuous  than  the  costumes  which  they  con- 
cealed. They  were  not  intended  simply  to  protedl 
their  wearers  during  a  hurried  transit  across  a 
sidewalk.  They  were  meant  for  the  slow  descent 
of  stately  stairs  where  the  art  of  the  costumer  could 
be  deliberately  studied  and  its  minutest  details 
absorbed  and  appreciated. 

Toward  the  foot  of  the  long  flight  the  pro- 

46 


PALAZZO  RUSPOLI 

gress  became  slower.  Down  in  the  open  portico, 
below,  we  could  seethe  people  standing  in  a  solid 
mass  waiting  for  carriages.  The  inevitable  cigarette 
was  produced.  Ladies  stood  in  the  damp  night  air 
and  chatted  complacently,  regardless  of  the  fad: 
that  only  the  flimsiest  shield  of  lace  and  silk  pro- 
teded  their  arms  and  shoulders  from  the  mid- 
night atmosphere.  To-morrow  they  would  per- 
haps be  shivering  under  furs. 

Carriages  were  driven  in  through  the  porte- 
cochere,  single  file,  in  an  apparently  unending  se- 
quence. As  each  one  halted  for  a  moment  at  the 
door,  a  name  would  be  called  out  like  a  number 
in  a  lottery,  and  the  claimants  of  the  vehicle  would 
struggle  forward, climb  into  the  dark  interior,  and 
be  hurried  oflF  to  make  room  for  the  next.  After 
interminable  waiting  our  turn  finally  came.  The 
door  of  the  vehicle  was  banged  behind  us  before 
we  were  fairly  seated,  and  the  carriage  was  rattling 
at  a  rapid  pace  over  the  rough  pavement  of  the 
courtyard  toward  the  exit  on  the  opposite  side. 
Once  out  in  the  street,  the  passing  flare  of  a  street 
lamp  made  it  possible  to  consult  a  watch.  It  was 
twenty  minutes  of  one.  The  fundion  was  what  the 
Romans  would  call  early.  They  would  go  home 
filled  with  regrets  at  not  having  had  more  to  see 
and  protesting  against  the  premature  termination 
of  the  evening's  entertainment. 


47 


THE  RACES 


CHAPTER  III 
THE  RACES 

THE  Romans  have  other  resources  for 
amusement  beside  the  fatiguing  func- 
tions of  the  salon.  Various  forms  of  rec- 
reation in  the  open  air  have  become  popular  in 
recent  years — forms  of  recreation  which  were 
planted  in  the  Roman  soil  in  the  first  instance  as 
exotics  but  which  have  since  then  taken  root  and 
become  thoroughly  acclimated.  The  fox-hunt- 
ing on  the  Campagna  is  one  of  the  examples  of 
a  domesticated  foreign  sport,  taken  bodily  from 
the  usages  of  another  social  world,  and  incorpo- 
rated into  the  Roman  social  life  with  all  its  pict- 
uresque accessories.  And  among  the  other  out- 
of-door  sports,  which  at  least  refled  the  influence 
of  foreign  example,  one  must  reckon  the  races 
which  come  off  at  stated  periods  at  the  race- 
courses near  the  city — old  as  the  Roman  life 
itself  in  essentials,  it  may  be,  but  still  showing 
the  force  of  foreign  precedents  in  their  accesso- 
ries and  their  little  details. 

It  is  perhaps  beyond  the  truth  to  assert  that 
they  come  off  at  stated  periods,  for  the  races  at 
Rome  are  very  movable  feasts.  The  posting  of 
the  large  affiches  which  warn  the  public  that  they 

51 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

are  about  to  occur  are  received  by  this  same 
knowing  public  with  many  reservations.  They 
have  learned  by  experience  that  racing  dates  are 
very  uncertain,  and  that  the  fixed  day  assigned 
for  the  event  can  hardly  be  interpreted  to  mean 
more  than  ^^  quanta  prima  "  or  "  quando  Dio  vuole" 
A  week  of  continuous  rains  between  the  posting 
of  the  big  placards  and  the  race-day  as  therein 
appointed,  or  a  downpour  on  the  morning  of  the 
day  itself,  will  be  unquestioningly  accepted  as  a 
dispensation  of  Providence  against  the  event,  and 
the  awaited  festival  will  be,  as  a  matter  of  course, 
postponed  to  some  more  propitious  moment. 

I  have  in  mind  a  year  when  the  spring  rains 
were  particularly  persistent  and  when  the  early 
races  at  Tor  di  Quinto — which  were  to  consti- 
tute the  lever  de  rideau  of  the  racing  season — 
were  moved  along  the  calendar  by  successive 
notches,  until  the  public  began  to  be  somewhat 
sceptical  as  to  whether  they  would  come  off  at 
all.  By  a  chance — which  could  be  reckoned  as 
nothing  more  than  a  chance — one  of  the  days 
to  which  the  little  festival  had  been  postponed 
dawned  at  last  with  brilliant  sunshine,  and  the 
irrepressible  enthusiasts  of  the  turf  prepared  to 
go  out  to  Tor  di  Quinto  and  see  what  would 
transpire.  It  was  an  opportunity  not  to  be  lost 
for  observing  a  characfleristic  phase  of  modern 
Roman  life,  and  we  joined  with  the  rest  in  the 
52 


THE  RACES 

procession  which  streamed  out  through  the  Porta 
del  Popolo  and  took  its  way  northward  over 
the  old  Via  Flaminia  toward  the  grassy  meadow 
where  the  racing  was  to  take  place. 

The  escape  from  the  town  into  the  open  coun- 
try, and  the  exchanging  of  the  vitiated  air  of 
closed  rooms  for  the  bracing  freshness  of  the 
outer  atmosphere,  are  after  all  the  best  features 
of  little  expeditions  like  this.  In  the  present  in- 
stance there  was,  for  us,  the  slight  additional 
stimulus  of  being  on  horseback,  which  made  it 
possible  to  move  more  freely  and  gave  us  an 
agreeable  feeling  of  independence.  The  sense  of 
being  in  the  country  does  not  assail  one  imme- 
diately as  one  issues  from  the  Porta  del  Popolo 
as  there  is  a  suburb  just  outside  the  gate  with 
high  houses  closely  bordering  the  road  for  a 
half-mile  or  more.  But  after  that  the  space  be- 
comes more  open  and  one  gets  glimpses,  off  to 
the  right,  of  the  softly  moulded  heights  of  the 
Monti  Parioli,  and  to  the  left  of  Monte  Mario 
rising  nobly  into  the  serene  Roman  sky.  At  a  cer- 
tain point  the  Flaminian  Way  strikes  the  Tiber, 
coming  up  to  it  at  an  abrupt  right  angle,  and  is 
carried  over  it  by  a  bridge  of  massive  stonework 
— the  historic  Pons  Milvius.  On  this  particular 
day  the  bridge  needed  all  the  massiveness  of  its 
masonry  to  resist  the  impetuous  on-rush  of  the 
current  which  battled  against  it.  The  Tiber  was 

53 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

in  flood.  The  weeks  of  rains  had  swollen  it  to 
twice  its  normal  size.  All  that  immense  extent 
of  upland,  waving  up  into  hills  and  mountains, 
which  environs  its  distant  source,  had  been  con- 
tributing rivulets  and  rills  and  lesser  rivers  to 
increase  its  volume.  And  it  was  coming  down, 
now,  with  a  flood  of  tawny  water  which  threat- 
ened to  carry  everything  away  before  it. 

On  the  farther  side  of  the  bridge  the  road 
turned  sharply  to  the  right  and  brought  us  after 
another  half-mile  to  the  entrance  of  the  racing 
enclosure.  On  this  occasion  we  chose  the  oval 
inside  of  the  track  as  our  point  of  observation, 
rather  than  the  pesage^  because  it  permitted 
greater  freedom  of  movement  and  a  better  view 
of  the  pesage  itself.  The  best  part  of  the  after- 
noon's experience,  as  we  looked  at  it  in  retro- 
sped,  was  this  opportunity  to  look  at  the  scene 
from  different  points  of  view  and  go  where  we 
chose.  The  day  had  turned  out  nearly  perfed. 
The  sun  was  unclouded.  The  wide  level,  com- 
mencing at  the  river  bank,  was  green  with  the 
first  freshness  of  spring;  and  at  the  inner  edge 
of  the  plain  it  broke  into  gentle  undulations, 
covered  with  this  same  soft  carpet  of  verdure. 
On  one  of  these  lower  hills  was  the  site  of  the 
old  Tower  of  Quintus,  the  fragment  of  Roman 
antiquity  which  gave  its  name  to  the  spot. 

After  the  usual  period  of  impatient  waiting 
54 


THE  RACES 

the  first  race  was  brought  on, — a  contest  for  the 
Ponte  Milvio  stakes,  appropriately  named  from 
the  historic  bridge  which  we  had  just  crossed. 
The  purses,  I  should  say,  were  not  large,  and  the 
occasion  was  obviously  one  which  depended  more 
for  its  importance  on  the  social  status  of  the  par- 
ticipants than  on  the  value  of  the  premiums  or 
the  records  of  the  horses.  The  horses  in  all  the 
races  were  to  be  ridden  by  their  owners  or  by 
some  persons  other  than  professional  jockeys. 
We  discovered  this  fad:  in  scanning  the  pro- 
gramme. The  contests  were  for  "gentlemen 
riders.'*  I  quote  these  words  because  they  were 
printed  in  English  on  the  piece  of  cardboard 
which  we  held  in  our  hands.  The  programme, 
indeed,  bristled  with  English  words, — most  of 
them,  probably,  quite  unpronounceable  to  the 
persons  who  were  responsible  for  their  use,  but 
with  few  exceptions  corredly  spelled.  This  latter 
circumstance  deserves  to  be  noted,  for  the  achiev- 
ing of  corred  spelling  of  English  by  Italians  is 
as  rare  as  the  corred  spelling  of  Italian  by  Eng- 
lish. In  justice  to  both  sides,  I  feel  obliged  to 
state  this  proposition  with  a  double  face,  because 
the  errors  of  orthography  are  not,  as  we  are  in 
the  habit  of  thinking,  wholly  on  the  Italian  side. 
To  cite  a  single  instance,  I  may  say  that,  after 
decades  of  satisfadory  digestion,  we  have  not  yet 
achieved  the  corred  spelling  of  maccheroni ;  and 

55 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

this  single  example  may  teach  us  a  lesson  of 
charity  in  our  criticism. 

The  first  race  brought  to  the  front  a  company 
of  military  riders.  All  of  the  jockeys  (pronounced 
in  Italy  "yocky")  were,  or  had  been,  officers, 
and  they  rode  remarkably  well.  The  Italian  offi- 
cer is  apt  to  pride  himself  on  his  horsemanship ; 
and  the  "military"  as  a  class  are  apt  to  speak 
slightingly  of  civilian  riding.  Their  vanity  in  the 
matter  is,  in  the  main,  well  founded.  In  their 
preliminary  training  the  most  severe  discipline 
is  brought  to  bear  upon  them,  and  when  they 
achieve  a  real  mastery  of  their  art  their  accom- 
plishment is  appreciated  and  brings  them  in  a  sat- 
isfying amount  of  applause.  The  performances  of 
the  best  riders  are  shown  to  a  wider  audience  than 
the  public  of  the  parade  ground.  They  are  held 
up  to  public  admiration  in  the  shop-windows  of 
the  Corso  through  the  medium  of  instantaneous 
photography.  Lieutenant  A.  is  caught  in  mid-air 
as  he  vaults  a  high  gate;  Major  B.  is  shown 
sticking  on  the  saddle  while  his  mount  stands 
ered  on  its  hind  legs ;  and  Captain  C.  is  exhib- 
ited in  the  ad  of  coasting  down  an  incline  of 
forty-five  degrees,  with  the  four  feet  of  his  horse 
bunched  into  a  moving  pivot  beneath  him.  And 
as  a  result  of  this  diligent  advertising  the  good 
riders  become  almost  as  famous  as  the  popular 
dramatic  artists  of  the  day. 
56 


*ast* 


THE  RACES 

In  the  first  contest  it  was  the  young  Marquis 
Roccagiovine  who  carried  off  the  prize — an  ex- 
officer  who  had  been  retired  from  the  army  after 
his  period  of  regular  service  with  the  rank  of 
captain.  He  was  at  this  time  the  M.  F.  H.  of 
the  Roman  Hunt  and  one  of  the  most  daring 
and  expert  of  its  riders.  Roccagiovine  was  one 
of  the  young  Romans  who  enjoyed  a  certain 
prominence  because  of  a  special  family  connec- 
tion. He  had  the  blood  of  the  Bonapartes  in  his 
veins — not  of  course  any  of  the  blood  of  the 
great  Napoleon  because  that  ceased  to  flow  in 
any  one's  veins  after  the  death  of  the  Duke  of 
Reichstadt — but  of  two  of  his  brothers,  Lucien 
and  Joseph.  What  one  could  see  of  him  on  the 
race-course  was  that  he  was  not  a  decadent  or 
anemic  offspring,  burdened  with  the  physical  im- 
perfedions  which  sometimes  go  with  blue  blood. 
He  was  an  athletically  built  man  with  a  bronzed 
complexion  and  something  of  the  conformation 
of  a  race-horse  himself.  No  superfluous  flesh  en- 
cumbered his  well-modelled  limbs,  and  the  dash 
and  fire  and  persistence  which  he  put  into  his 
riding  helped  to  carry  out  the  race-horse  sug- 
gestion. 

Roccagiovine  appeared  in  a  number  of  races 
and  always  with  credit.  In  one  of  them  he  was 
pitted  against  his  cousin.  Count  Pompeo  Cam- 
pello,  also  a  Bonaparte  on  his  mother's  side; 

57 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

and  the  contest  was  given  a  particular  spice  from 
the  circumstance  of  its  being  narrowed  down, 
in  the  end,  to  a  competition  between  these  two 
young  men.  Neither  of  them,  it  should  be  said, 
spared  the  other.  It  was  a  struggle  in  which 
every  possible  expedient  to  secure  an  advantage 
was  resorted  to  on  each  side.  One  of  the  other 
riders,  in  the  mad  effort  to  keep  up,  was  thrown 
from  his  horse  and  left  in  solitude  and  disgrace 
on  the  farther  side  of  the  course.  In  the  end 
Roccagiovine  was  again  the  vidor,  though  his 
cousin  succeeded  several  times  in  gaining  the 
lead  and  pressed  closely  upon  him  to  the  last. 

In  the  intervals  between  the  races  we  found 
some  amusement  in  studying  the  programme  and 
noting  the  strange  vagaries  of  taste  which  had 
didtated  the  choice  of  the  names  of  the  horses. 
Foreign  names  predominated.  One  of  the  racers 
was  called  North  Sun  and  another  Jersey,  and  still 
others  bore  such  designations  as  Adress,  Buddha, 
Sportsman,  Fisherman,  Hawley,  Dear  Hope, 
Dilemma,  and  Need's  Must.  It  was  Dilemma 
which  had  left  its  rider  sprawling  upon  the  turf 
in  the  race  just  described,  with  the  alternative 
of  catching  his  flying  mount  or  walking  home 
across  the  oval  in  disgrace;  and  it  was  Need's 
Must  which  Count  Campello  had  mounted  in 
this  same  contest  when  he  had  been  apparently 
so  determined  to  win.  The  popularity  of  these 
58 


THE  RACES 

English  names  is  one  of  the  many  proofs  which 
are  continually  coming  to  the  front  to  show  that 
in  horse  matters  the  English  race  takes  the  lead 
and  the  others  follow.  English  words  come  as 
naturally  to  the  surface  in  matters  of  the  turf  as 
French  ones  in  matters  of  the  cuisine;  and  in 
both  cases  they  simply  indicate  the  nationality 
which  has  produced  the  most  acceptable  ideas 
and  which  sets  the  pace  for  the  rest. 

Another  source  of  entertainment  always  open 
to  us  in  the  intermezzos  was  the  observation  of 
the  people  arrayed  in  the  reserved  enclosure  op- 
posite us.  In  the  centre  of  this  enclosure  was  the 
royal  pavilion,  and  on  either  side  of  it,  though 
not  connected,  were  the  seats  for  the  other  spec- 
tators. These  seats  on  the  day  to  which  I  refer 
were  only  partly  filled,  but  down  in  front,  drawn 
up  along  the  course,  was  a  respedable  number 
of  drags  and  other  vehicles  of  would-be  English 
cut,  in  which  a  brilliant  array  of  signori  and 
signore  were  seated  enjoying  the  events.  The 
spring  was  far  enough  advanced  to  make  light 
toilets  permissible  and  the  bright  tints  of  the 
costumes  and  the  parasols  made  the  pidure  one 
of  much  vivacity  and  brilliancy. 

There  were  none  of  the  royal  family  at  these 
little  races  at  Tor  di  Quinto,  but  their  interest 
in  horsey  matters — or  perhaps  one  ought  rather 
to  say,  their  conscientious  sense  of  duty  in  such 

59 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

matters — brought  them  into  public  view  on  an 
occasion  of  somewhat  similar  nature  a  few  days 
later,  when  the  members  of  the  Roman  Hunt 
gave  an  exhibition  of  horsemanship  in  one  of 
the  large  theatres  which  was  converted  into  a  hip- 
podrome for  the  occasion.  The  programme  in- 
cluded not  only  serious  numbers,  but,  as  is  usual 
on  such  occasions,  also  a  certain  amount  of  bur- 
lesque and  farce.  The  serious  riding  was  very  well 
done,  and  more  than  endurable.  The  comedy  ele- 
ment in  the  performance  one  could  not  say  so 
much  for.  It  was  perhaps  no  worse  than  in  simi- 
lar performances  elsewhere,  but  the  level  which 
is  usually  reached  on  such  occasions  is  never  very 
high,  and  the  most  charitable  attitude  which  one 
can  take  toward  it  is  to  pass  it  over  in  silence. 
Amateur  comedians  seem  to  be  the  only  artists 
who  really  reach  the  superlative  of  dulness.They 
acquire  a  mastery  of  the  art  of  boring  the  public 
to  which  the  professional  never  attains. 

The  royalties  made  their  appearance  early  on 
this  occasion  and  did  not  interrupt  the  perform- 
ance by  arriving  after  it  had  commenced.  The 
first  signal  of  their  advent  was  given  by  the 
people  in  the  proscenium  box  opposite  them, 
who  rose  at  once,  and  whose  rising  brought  the 
whole  audience  to  their  feet.  Queen  Margherita 
came  into  view  at  the  left  of  the  arched  opening 
and  seated  herself  in  an  arm-chair  there.  Her 
60 


THE  RACES 

son  took  a  position  next  her  with  his  wife  at  his 
side,  and  the  Duchess  of  Genoa,  Margherita's 
mother,  stationed  herself  in  2.fauteuil  at  the  ex- 
treme right.  The  opportunity  was  an  excellent 
one  for  comparing  the  different  faces  of  this  in- 
teresting group.  Queen  Margherita  and  her  son 
had  profiles  which  were  strikingly  similar.  At 
certain  moments,  when  they  both  turned  the 
same  way  to  see  the  same  thing,  the  lines  of  the 
faces  seemed  absolutely  the  same.  The  Duchess 
of  Genoa,  too,  showed  somewhat  of  the  same 
physiognomy,  particularly  in  the  outline  of  the 
nose — which  seems  therefore  to  be  a  trait  brought 
into  the  present  Italian  royal  house  through  Ger- 
man ancestors.  Elena  of  Montenegro  of  course 
showed  no  resemblance  to  the  others,  but  one 
would  hardly  assume  to  say  that  her  features  were 
less  refined.  She  may  have  Slavonic  blood  in  her 
veins,  but  if  she  does  its  rudenesses  do  not  reveal 
themselves  unpleasantly  in  her  physiognomy. 
Her  countenance  is  regular  and  finely  moulded. 
Few  persons  would  guess  her  origin  or  imagine 
that  she  had  any  kinship  with  the  hardy  race  which 
inhabits  the  mountains  and  peoples  the  scattered 
towns  of  her  native  country. 

Possibly  this  child  of  a  warrior  and  nation- 
builder  showed  the  most  resourcefulness  in 
emergency  of  any  of  the  three  women  in  the 
little  group — a  valuable  royal  trait.  When  they 

6i 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

first  entered  the  box  a  low  green  screen,  mounted 
on  a  jointed  arm  and  intended  to  shield  the  oc- 
cupants of  the  box  from  the  glare  of  the  foot- 
lights, stood  up  in  such  a  way  as  to  interfere 
with  the  view  of  the  arena.  Margherita  tugged  at 
it  with  feminine  impetuosity,  to  dislodge  it  from 
its  position;  but  it  refused  to  be  dislodged.  Elena 
put  a  restraining  hand  on  her  arm,  leaned  forward 
and  removed  a  screw  which  released  the  brass 
support.  The  offending  screen  came  promptly 
out  of  its  place  and  was  easily  laid  aside.  There 
was  a  momentary  exchange  of  glances  which 
communicated  thanks  and  appreciation.  I  do  not 
know  that  one  person  in  twenty  observed  this  lit- 
tle manoeuvre  by  the  sagacious  Montenegrine, 
but  it  must  have  struck  those  who  did  notice 
it  as  telling  its  own  little  tale  of  temperament  and 
charader. 

As  the  evening  wore  on  we  occasionally 
glanced  at  the  occupants  of  the  royal  box  to  see 
what  impression  the  performance  was  making 
upon  them  and  how  they  endured  the  comedy 
passages.  Out  of  the  group  of  four  it  appeared 
to  be  the  Duchess  of  Genoa  who  resisted  the 
ennui  of  the  occasion  the  most  successfully.  She 
was  perhaps  more  hardened  than  the  others  to  the 
boredom  of  such  entertainments  by  her  longer 
experience.  At  any  rate,  her  lorgnon  was  kept  in 
constant  employment,  studying  the  performers 
62 


Queen  Elena 

From  a  photograph  by  Brogi  of  Florence 


THE  RACES 

while  the  programme  was  moving,  and  the  audi- 
ence during  its  halts.  The  other  three  did  not 
exhibit  a  very  lively  interest  in  the  proceedings. 
Queen  Margherita  would  occasionally  smile  at 
some  of  the  pleasantries,  showing  that  her  in- 
exhaustible good-humor  had  a  bright  look  or 
two  in  store  for  even  such  occasions  as  this ;  but 
her  son  and  her  daughter  looked  on  with  al- 
most unbroken  gravity.  The  former  in  particu- 
lar seemed  to  be  far  away  in  his  thoughts  from 
the  scene  which  was  transpiring  immediately  be- 
fore his  eyes  and  rarely  spoke  or  changed  his 
expression  during  the  whole  evening. 

As  for  the  rest  of  the  audience, — which  was 
what  was  called  a  particularly  brilliant  one,  with 
all  the  ambassadors  and  all  the  princes  and  all  the 
social  figurants  who  go  to  make  up  the  T^utta 
Romay — it  simpered  complacently  at  the  buf- 
fooneries of  the  clowns  and  accorded  them  and 
the  other  adors  a  proper  amount  of  condescend- 
ing applause  when  their  efforts  were  concluded. 
The  performance  went  on  interminably,  after  the 
manner  of  amateur  entertainments,  and  when  we 
left,  at  midnight,  it  was  still  in  progress.  For  the 
Roman  world  this  extension  of  the  programme 
into  the  small  hours  was  no  drawback.  The 
Italians  apparently  never  sleep  when  they  can 
find  anything  else  to  do.  They  keep  at  their 
theatres  and   their  receptions  and  their  soirees 

63 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

of  every  description  until  the  foreigner  is  com- 
pletely exhausted,  and  the  next  morning  they 
are  up  and  about  their  daily  affairs  with  un- 
abated vitality  while  the  non- Latin  is  still  trying 
to  make  up,  by  very  late  rising,  for  the  unusual 
fatigues  of  the  previous  day. 

I  hasten  back  from  this  digression  to  speak 
of  the  more  important  occasion  in  the  horse 
calendar  which  occurred  a  few  weeks  later  in  the 
form  of  certain  races  at  the  Capannelle.  The 
Capannelle  is  the  name  given  to  the  eastern  race- 
course, four  miles  out  of  town,  where  the  Roman 
world  goes  en  masse  in  Easter  week  to  see  the 
best  races  of  the  year — the  races  which  call  out 
the  best  horses  and  for  which  the  largest  purses 
are  offered.  The  concourse  of  varied  humanity 
which  streams  out  to  this  event  is  something  like 
that  which  flocks  to  a  great  English  race-course 
on  a  great  racing  day,  or  as  much  like  it  as  could 
be  expelled  under  the  circumstances.  Parties  are 
made  up  weeks  in  advance  for  the  enjoyment  of 
this  field-day,  and  it  is  well  to  speak  in  season 
for  carriages,  as  vehicles  of  every  sort  are  at  a 
premium,  and,  if  one  delays  one's  preparations 
too  long,  are  not  to  be  had  at  any  price.  The 
drive  to  the  Capannelle  takes  one  out  along  the 
Via  Appia  Nuova,  emerging  from  the  Lateran 
Gate,  and  when  the  city  is  fairly  left  behind  it 
introduces  one  into  the  midst  of  a  gently  undu- 
64 


THE  RACES 

lating  plain  which  at  the  Easter  season  is  covered 
with  a  carpet  of  fresh  green  and  is  most  refresh- 
ing to  the  eye. 

As  for  the  adual  racing,  at  this  much  looked- 
forward-to  field-day, — the  adual  running  of  the 
horses  around  the  course, — it  did  not  seem  to 
be  by  any  means  what  the  upper  stratum  of  the 
public  came  out  principally  to  see.  They  were 
much  more  occupied  with  themselves,  except 
for  a  few  of  the  ultra-enthusiasts  in  racing  mat- 
ters, than  they  were  with  the  horses.  And  in- 
deed I  might  go  further  and  say  that  it  was  not 
so  much  what  happened  at  the  race-course  as 
the  return  from  it  which  seemed  to  be  regarded 
as  the  principal  feature  of  the  occasion.  The  re- 
turn was  a  fundion  in  itself,  an  animated  and 
varied  one,  into  which  all  the  participants  threw 
themselves  with  fervor;  and  as  I  look  back  upon 
the  occasion  as  a  whole  it  seems  to  have  been 
the  streaming  back  of  the  company  toward  Rome 
which  marked  the  highest  level  of  gaiety  at- 
tained during  the  day. 

The  racing  programme,  to  tell  the  truth,  was 
rather  fatiguing.  The  events  were  perhaps  rea- 
sonably numerous  and  reasonably  important, — 
measured  by  Italian  standards, — but  the  pauses 
between  them  were  long  at  the  beginning  and 
grew  longer  as  the  afternoon  advanced.  We 
found  some  distradion,  as  at  Tor  di  Quinto,  in 

65 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

looking  at  the  landscape  which  on  this  side  of 
Rome  is  particularly  beautiful.  From  our  places 
on  the  raised  seats  we  could  look  out  southward 
over  the  gently  undulating  greensward  to  the 
uplift  of  the  levels  at  Frascati  and  Marino.  The 
Campagna  raised  itself  up  in  a  sudden  sweep, 
there,  and  carried  on  its  verdurous  slopes  a 
dozen  white-walled  villages  and  hamlets  which  de- 
tached themselves  with  cameo-like  distind:ness 
from  the  sombre  background.  It  was  a  pleas- 
ure to  pick  out  and  name  these  places  which  the 
sojourner  in  Rome  so  soon  learns  to  know  and 
love,  and  to  piece  out  the  a6tual  prospeft  with 
one's  memories  of  certain  other  things  not  at 
that  moment  visible — such  as  the  shaded  pas- 
sages of  the  road  from  Castel  Gandolfo  to  Al- 
bano,  the  viaduc5t  spanning  the  deep-cut  valley 
beyond,  and  the  Lake  of  Nemi  settling  down 
into  its  volcanic  basin  behind  the  outer  ridge  of 
hills. 

When  the  distradions  of  the  landscape  failed 
we  could  look  at  the  people  around  us,  or  we 
could  descend  from  the  seats  and  join  the  prom- 
enaders  who  moved  back  and  forth  over  the 
grassy  enclosure  in  front.  The  seats,  fortunately, 
were  not  placed  close  to  the  course,  and  there 
was  a  broad  open  space  of  smooth  turf  running 
along  before  them  where  it  was  always  possible 
to  circulate  without  coming  in  contadl  with  any 
66 


THE  RACES 

of  the  disagreeable  personal  element  in  the  race- 
course public.  Luncheon  tables  were  spread  in 
the  open  air  at  one  end  of  this  pesage  and  at  the 
other  end  there  was  an  enclosure  where  the 
horses  were  kept  and  which  the  occupants  of 
the  reserved  seats  were  at  liberty  to  visit  when- 
ever they  chose.  A  sort  of  perpetual  reception 
went  on  in  this  horsey  precind,  in  which  the 
owners  of  the  animals  conjointly  with  their  four- 
footed  possessions  aded  as  hosts.  The  quad- 
rupeds were  sumptuously  attired.  They  wore 
blankets  in  large  checks  or  plaids,  of  the  kind 
which  are  manufadlured  in  England  exclusively 
for  exportation  to  the  Continent,  and  these  al- 
ready sufficiently  gaudy  trappings  were  further 
embellished  with  monograms  and  crests  wher- 
ever possible.  The  Romans,  like  the  Parisians, 
are  quite  innocent  of  the  touch  of  caricature 
which  they  introduce  into  their  English  horse- 
effeds  in  translating  them  into  a  Latin  expres- 
sion, but  those  who  know  the  originals  appreciate 
and  enjoy  this  unconscious  burlesque. 

Ladies  ventured  fearlessly  into  the  enclosure 
where  the  horses  were  kept  and  dragged  their 
long  gowns  over  the  grass  as  if  it  had  been  the 
carpet  of  a  drawing-room.  The  conversation  went 
on  at  an  animated  pace  and  was  not  by  any 
means  concerned  exclusively  with  the  events  of 
the  racing  programme.  Once  in  a  while  the  buzz 

,   67 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

of  irrelevant  talk  would  be  direded  into  a  more 
pertinent  channel  by  the  information  that  a  race 
was  in  progress,  and  upon  this  announcement 
the  centre  of  interest  would  change  for  the  mo- 
ment to  the  race-course,  where  perhaps  five  or 
six  black  specks — each  representing  a  horse  and 
a  rider — would  be  seen  moving  along  in  con- 
vulsive jumps,  on  the  farther  side  of  the  vast 
ellipse.  Speculation  then  became  rife  as  to  which 
was  ahead.  Was  it  Buddha — for  Buddha  was 
among  the  entries;  or  was  it  Kitten — for  there 
was  a  kitten  in  the  contest;  or  was  it  still  another 
of  the  animals  with  English  or  otherwise  unpro- 
nounceable names,  which  was  at  the  moment  in 
the  lead  and  bearing  its  rider  to  probable  vidory  ? 
Generally  the  interest  in  the  race,  once  aroused, 
would  remain  alive  until  the  result  was  decided; 
and  then  the  current  of  talk  would  turn  back 
again  into  its  more  permanent  channels  and  cir- 
culate around  the  events  and  personages  of  the 
little  Roman  social  world. 

Another  of  the  possible  distradlions  of  the 
afternoon  was  a  visit  to  the  restaurant,  which, 
as  I  have  said,  had  deployed  its  white-covered 
tables  and  marshalled  its  waiters  on  the  oblong 
of  turf  just  below  the  raised  seats.  The  public 
patronized  this  eating-place  rather  shyly  at  first, 
but  as  the  afternoon  advanced  it  showed  more 
and  more  warmth  in  its  attentions,  and  in  the  last 
68 


THE  RACES 

intermezzo  a  veritable  mob  of  well-dressed  men 
and  women  descended  upon  it  and  devoured 
the  last  remnant  of  its  supplies.  The  bill  of  fare 
was  semi-English,  with  tea  put  well  to  the  fore. 
^artines  de  heurre^  which  curiously  happens  to 
be  the  Italian  for  thin  slices  of  bread  and  butter, 
were  also  a  staple  of  the  larder  and  were  consumed 
in  considerable  quantities  as  an  accompaniment 
to  the  tea.  The  Romans  are,  I  believe,  not  fond 
of  either  of  these  articles,  but  they  ate  them  and 
drank  them  manfully  on  this  occasion,  even  after 
the  tea  had  become — as  the  result  of  too  great 
strain  upon  the  original  supply — not  much  more 
than  a  shadow  of  its  earlier  self  in  strength  and 
warmth.  It  was  our  misfortune,  personally,  to  en- 
counter it  in  the  last  stages  of  its  decadence,  and 
the  only  mitigation  of  the  evil  of  being  obliged 
to  drink  it  was  the  pleasure  which  we  incident- 
ally derived  from  seeing  it  laboriously  and  smil- 
ingly swallowed  by  the  consistent  Anglo-maniacs 
of  Italian  Rome. 

The  starting  of  the  horses  on  the  last  race — 
the  Derby  Reale^  as  it  is  called — broke  up  the 
company  at  the  tables  and  fastened  the  attention 
of  every  one  on  the  course — for  the  few  mo- 
ments which  remained  of  the  racing  programme. 
The  race  was,  indeed,  hotly  contested  by  horses 
of  some  consequence  and  was  as  well  worth  being 
seen  as  any  event  of  the  afternoon.  The  purse 

69 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

was  a  large  one  and  it  was  won  by  a  horse  of 
British  pedigree  owned  by  a  gentleman  who  has 
one  of  the  Ijest  racing  stables  in  Italy.  When  the 
result  was  finally  decided,  the  company  broke  up 
instantly  and  there  was  a  hurried  progress  toward 
the  exit  and  a  hasty  summoning  of  carriages  to 
get  into  the  procession  which  was  being  formed 
for  the  return  to  the  distant  town. 

All  roads  lead  to  Rome,  as  the  saying  is,  but 
only  one  that  day  had  all  Rome  upon  it.  I  do 
not  say  that  the  whole  population  of  the  city 
joined  in  the  procession,  but  I  should  be  tempted 
to  say  that  every  able-bodied  citizen  who  was 
not  in  the  moving  line  came  out  to  stare  at  the 
column  as  it  returned.  The  multitude  who  had 
adually  attended  the  races  used  every  species  of 
conveyance,  patrician  and  plebeian,  ancient  and 
modern.  Squadrons  of  bicycles,  mounted  by  a 
rather  rough  element,  dashed  by  the  slower  vehi- 
cles with  a  semi-savage  exhibition  of  leg-power 
and  of  lung-power.  An  occasional  automobile 
— although  the  automobile  is  not  yet  domesti- 
cated in  large  numbers  at  Rome — showed  itself 
here  and  there  in  the  moving  cortege,  getting 
out  of  the  line  whenever  a  chance  offered,  chuf- 
chuffing  ahead  with  a  sudden  spurt,  and  insert- 
ing itself  in  a  new  crevice  farther  ahead.  Two 
or  three  coaches — "steages'*  the  Romans  call 
them — added  eclat  to  the  moving  column  and 
70 


THE  RACES 

helped  to  intensify  the  English  flavor  which  it 
is,  after  all,  the  highest  ambition  of  the  Romans 
to  impress  upon  this  crowning  event  of  the 
racing  year. 

As  the  turbid  stream  of  vehicles  got  nearer 
the  town,  it  became  necessary  to  reduce  the  four 
files  to  two  in  order  to  enable  it  to  pass  through 
the  gate;  and  this  naturally  reduced  the  speed 
of  the  advance  very  materially,  and  even  at  times 
brought  the  procession  to  an  entire  stop.  The 
halts  of  the  column  gave  the  spedators  by  the 
wayside  the  best  chance  of  observation  which 
they  had  had,  and  they  utilized  it  to  the  utmost, 
pressing  up  to  the  carriages  and  examining  their 
occupants  with  a  cold-blooded  scrutiny  which 
was  received  by  the  ladies  in  these  vehicles  with 
evident  signs  of  discomfort  and  annoyance.  One 
of  the  few  advantages  of  the  occasional  pauses 
was  that  they  gave  us  an  opportunity  to  rid  our 
vehicles  of  the  gamins  who  fastened  themselves 
like  barnacles  to  the  back  irons.  Thanks  to  their 
ingenuity  in  keeping  out  of  sight  and  their  per- 
sistency of  attack,  they  had  most  of  them  suc- 
ceeded in  making  the  whole  distance  back  to 
Rome  without  being  obliged  more  than  once  or 
twice  to  touch  their  precious  feet  to  terra  firma. 

Inside  of  the  city  gate  the  earlier  arrivals  drew 
themselves  up  in  convenient  positions  to  observe 
the  entry  of  the  rest,  and  the  spedacle  of  this  as- 

71 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

sembled  multitude  which  was  unfolded  to  us  when 
we  finally  passed  through  the  ancient  barrier,  fur- 
nished the  last  and  one  of  the  most  striking 
tableaux  in  the  succession  of  interesting  pidt- 
ures  which  the  day  had  offered.  The  large  piazza 
at  the  Lateran  Gate  is  amphitheatrical  in  form, 
and  could  not  have  been  better  contrived  to 
bring  every  element  in  this  exhibition  of  horses, 
carriages,  and  pedestrians  distindly  into  view. 
The  carriages  were  arranged  by  hundreds  over 
this  great  area,  most  of  them  stationary,  with  a 
single  narrow  channel  left  open  in  the  midst  in 
order  not  absolutely  to  block  all  further  entries. 
Here  and  there  one  caught  a  glimpse  of  bright 
patches  of  color,  in  the  gala  liveries  still  used  by 
some  of  the  old  Roman  families;  and  in  nearly 
all  the  open  vehicles  there  were  ladies  in  light 
toilets  with  gay  parasols  to  add  brilliancy  to  the 
striking  scene. 

The  final  break-up  and  dismemberment  of 
this  motley  mass  marked  the  end  of  the  gaieties 
of  the  day.  Slowly  and  reludantly  the  compo- 
nent members  of  the  great  throng  left  their  places 
and  turned  into  some  one  of  the  side  streets 
which  led  townward  from  the  square.  We  real- 
ized at  a  certain  moment  that  it  was  better  to 
hurry  away  while  the  impression  of  a  crowded 
area  was  still  vivid  rather  than  to  see  it  visibly 
transformed  into  solitude  and  vacancy.  And  so 
72 


THE  RACES 

at  a  signal  our  Roman  driver,  who  was  quite  as 
interested  a  spectator  of  the  scene  as  ourselves, 
set  his  vehicle  into  motion  again,  and  we  trundled 
slowly  through  deserted  streets  back  to  the  hotel. 


73 


COUNTRY  HOUSES 


CHAPTER   IV 
COUNTRY  HOUSES 

PERSONS  who  hibernate  in  Rome  scatter 
like  homing  pigeons  at  the  first  sugges- 
tion of  summer  heat. 

Even  the  Romans  are  not  exempt  from  this 
terror  of  the  summer.  When  the  Dog-star  gains 
the  ascendant,  they  desert  the  Seven  Hills  and 
fly  to  other  heights — beside  which  those  storied 
summits  seem  like  the  merest  undulations  of  the 
Campagna. 

Their  homes  seem  to  be  perched  on  every 
hilltop.  The  Baron  della  Maschera  d'Oro  had 
one  in  the  pi6luresque  region  of  the  Sabines.  It 
stood  on  the  very  summit  of  a  peak,  with  a  little 
tributary  village  huddling  around  it. 

The  master  of  the  place  loved  the  spot  with 
an  afFedion  which  he  was  far  from  feeling  for  his 
other  house,  mortised  into  the  stonework  of  the 
town — a  solid,  massive  fragment  of  the  old,  old 
Rome.  If  he  had  had  his  say  the  whole  yearwould 
have  been  summer.  There  would  have  been  no 
month  of  the  twelve  when  he  could  not  stay  on 
his  Sabine  farm,  see  that  his  crops  were  growing 
properly,  and  look  after  the  welfare  of  his  tenants. 

When  he  asked  me,  or  rather  permitted  me, 

n 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

to  come  out  and  explore  his  castle  in  the  air,  I 
felt  naturally  much  indebted  to  him  for  his  cour- 
tesy. It  was  an  hour^s  ride  to  the  nearest  railway 
station.  He  had  sent  in  one  of  his  domestics  to 
the  hotel  to  give  me  minute  instructions  about 
the  route.  For  further  assurance  he  had  sent  word 
that  his  son  would  await  me  at  the  railway  sta- 
tion and  drive  me  up  to  the  house. 

The  last  announcement  was  not  a  wholly  grate- 
ful one.  I  did  not  know  the  son — though  that 
in  itself  was  a  small  matter.  The  disconcerting 
side  of  this  piece  of  additional  courtesy  was  that  it 
was  going  to  be  necessary  to  make  conversation 
in  a  foreign  language  for  five  kilometres  of  coun- 
try road.  One  naturally  wished  to  meet  one's  host 
with  an  unexhausted  mind,  and  after  such  a  weary- 
ing exercise  this  would  have  been  quite  impos- 
sible. I  begged  him  by  letter  to  keep  his  son  at 
home,  and  let  me  drive  up  to  the  house  without 
the  honor  or  the  burden  of  an  escort. 

As  the  train  pulled  out  from  the  Roman  sta- 
tion on  the  morning  set  for  the  visit,  I  found 
myself  wondering  whether  I  had  been  guilty  of 
unpardonable  rudeness  in  rejeding  his  kind  pro- 
posal. We  clattered  and  rattled  across  the  switches 
and  got  out  into  the  suburbs.  We  hurried  through 
the  suburbs  and  came  into  the  Campagna.  An 
aquedu6l  or  two  swung  around  toward  us,  as  if 
turning  on  an  invisible  pivot.  The  minutes  passed 

78 


h 
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w 
h 

o 

CO 

w 

Q 


COUNTRY  HOUSES 

by;  and  still  the  problem  of  manners  confronted 
me  and  remained  unsolved. 

We  came  to  the  Tiber  and  ran  along  beside  it. 
It  was  still  swollen  and  still  turbid  with  the  sedi- 
ment which  never  settles,  which  even  makes  a 
yellow  promontory  in  the  sea  where  it  comes  out. 
The  broad  current  doubled  back  and  forth  in 
large,  generous  curves.  We  were  on  the  highway 
to  Florence  and  followed  it  for  an  hour.  Suddenly 
the  train  slowed  down.  By  looking  out  ahead 
one  could  see  an  infinitesimal  station,  standing 
solitary  and  alone.  The  brakes  were  put  on 
with  more  force,  and  the  convoy  stopped. 

The  group  on  the  station  platform  was  made 
up  of  the  usual  company  of  contadini  and  petty 
officials,  who  constitute  the  personnel  of  these 
little  out-of-the-way  halting-places.  The  capo- 
stazione  came  and  went  in  his  red  cap.  A  solitary 
facchino  in  a  blue  blouse  looked  hopelessly  at  the 
closed  doors  of  the  carriages.  The  peasants  stared 
stupidly. 

In  a  second  after  the  halt  of  the  train  an  indi- 
vidual of  a  different  type  came  in  through  the 
exit  gate,  and  ran  his  eye  along  the  train.  He  was 
in  riding-clothes  with  white  breeches  and  high 
boots.  His  face  was  well  cut,  and  his  manner 
distinctly  superior. 

To  the  pradlised  eye  of  the  native  the  foreigner 
is  instantly  detedable.  It  is  sometimes  humiliat- 

79 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

ing  to  be  singled  out  so  instantly  and  unerringly. 
The  young  man  in  boots  came  diredly  to  the 
door  of  the  carnage  from  which  I  was  descend- 
ing and  stretched  out  his  hand.  There  was  a 
verbal  exchange  of  visiting-cards.  I  could  see 
from  the  expression  of  his  face  that  he  was  not 
deeply  offended  by  my  effort — my  evidently  fu- 
tile effort — to  keep  him  at  home. 

"Pardon,  monsieur,"  he  began,  "si  je  suis 
venu  vous  chercher." 

It  was  certainly  a  mitigation  of  the  prospec- 
tive evil  to  have  him  speak  in  the  Gallic  tongue. 
As  between  the  two  evils,  one  naturally  chooses 
French  in  preference  to  Italian.  There  is  at  least 
the  greater  certainty  in  the  terms  of  address.  One 
is  not  talked  to  in  the  third  person  as  if  one 
were  an  indeterminate,  vague,  and  absent  per- 
sonality. The  plain  vous  is  more  satisfactory  and 
more  certainly  intelligible,  even  if  less  courtly 
and  deferential. 

"You  will  excuse  me,"  he  began  again,  "for 
coming  to  meet  you."  We  were  walking  rapidly 
along  the  platform  as  he  spoke.  "But  I  have 
really  complied  with  your  request,  although  I 
may  not  have  seemed  to  do  so." 

The  little  gate  by  which  he  had  entered  was 
before  us,  and  in  a  moment  more  we  were  leaving 
the  platform  and  approaching  the  open  court  on 
the  farther  side  of  the  station. 
80 


COUNTRY  HOUSES 

"I  am  prepared  to  offer  you  an  alternative," 
he  went  on  in  the  most  amiable  of  tones.  "Here 
is  the  carriage  ready  and  waiting.  Here  is  also  my 
horse.  Now  I  will  go  up  with  you  in  the  carriage, 
or  I  will  ride  back  on  my  horse  and  leave  you  to 
yourself  Which  shall  it  be?" 

The  foreigner  who  was  confronted  with  this 
elaborate  preparation  of  alternatives  hesitated  a 
moment. 

"You  are  at  perfed  liberty  to  do  as  you 
choose,"  he  persisted.  "  I  shall  be  quite  content 
to  go  back  on  my  horse.  I  will  ride  alongside, 
occasionally,  and  see  how  you  are  getting  along." 

There  was  nothing  to  do  but  to  yield  to  this 
gentle  urging.  The  door  of  the  carriage  was 
opened,  and  I  proceeded  to  inhabit  its  roomy 
vacancy,  not  unreconciled  to  the  period  of  pros- 
pedive  tranquillity  which  it  promised. 

The  road  was  one  of  the  fine  country  roads  of 
Italy.  The  surface  was  hard  and  dustless.  The 
grades  were  easy. 

We  bowled  along  through  an  undulating  coun- 
try, going  straight  away  from  the  Tiber  toward 
the  hills.  It  was  the  region  of  the  Sabines,  which 
had  been  used  for  villas  and  country  estates  since 
the  days  of  the  ancient  Latins.  Centuries  of  plant- 
ings and  harvests  had  not  exhausted  the  soil.  The 
microscopic  husbandry  of  the  patient  modern 
tenant  still  made  it  blossom  and  fruit. 

8i 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

The  road  crossed  a  level  bridge  over  a  shallow 
stream.  In  a  new  country  a  rude  structure  of 
planks  would  have  been  thought  sufficient.  Here 
in  this  land  of  permanencies  a  broad  construc- 
tion of  masonry,  with  firm  parapets  and  a  paved 
roadway  carried  on  massive  arches,  covered  the 
little  watercourse.  In  five  centuries  more  it  will  be 
still  in  its  place,  doing  as  good  work  as  it  does 
to-day. 

We  began  to  ascend  the  heights,  the  road 
twisting  and  turning  to  save  the  grades.  Looking 
ahead,  I  caught,  now  and  then,  a  glimpse  of  my 
pilot.  He  was  sitting  in  a  nonchalant  fashion  on 
his  rather  lively  horse,  with  the  security  of  a  man 
who  has  ridden  horses  from  boyhood. 

Occasionally  he  dropped  back  for  a  civil  word 
or  two.  At  a  sudden  turn  a  little  cluster  of  build- 
ings came  into  sight  far  above  us,  perched  on  the 
outer  point  of  a  long  ridge.  "That  is  the  place," 
he  said.  "We  are  going  there." 

The  winding  road  took  us  easily  though  slowly 
to  the  summit  of  the  height.  A  wall  with  a  high 
gate  barred  the  entrance  to  the  village,  and 
through  the  gate  a  straight  street  became  visible 
ahead,  leading  to  a  little  square.  The  place  at  that 
moment  seemed  to  be  swarming  with  humanity. 
The  villagers  stood  in  their  doorways  and  bowed 
at  the  carriage  as  it  passed.  Their  salutations 
would  have  been  oppressive  if  one  did  not  be- 
82 


COUNTRY  HOUSES 

come  used  to  such  things  in  Italy.  Good  man- 
ners are  in  the  blood. 

The  horseman  had  made  a  spurt  forward  at  the 
entrance  of  the  hamlet  and  disappeared.  When 
the  carriage  drew  up  in  the  square,  he  was  no- 
where to  be  seen.  A  servant  came  out  and  opened 
the  door  of  the  vehicle  and  led  the  way  to  the 
entrance  of  the  house.  We  were  before  a  large 
building,  fronted  by  two  tiers  of  open  loggias  in 
the  style  of  the  early  sixteenth  century.  Long 
wings  of  plainer  construction  ran  out  from  the 
loggias  on  either  side;  and  to  the  right  they  joined 
with  a  church,  so  as  to  make  the  circuit  of 
buildings  around  the  little  piazza  complete  and 
unbroken. 

A  long  and  dignified  flight  of  stairs  led  up 
through  the  interior  of  the  loggia  to  the  second 
floor — the  principal  floor  of  the  house.  From 
the  landing  I  caught  sight  of  the  young  man  in 
boots  standing  at  the  top  of  the  staircase  with 
his  father  beside  him.  The  older  man  had  snow- 
white  hair  and  an  expression  of  great  benevo- 
lence. He  extended  his  hand  at  once,  with  a 
warmth  of  manner  which  does  not  always  char- 
acterize his  class.  "Did  you  find  your  drive  from 
the  station  agreeable? "  was  his  first  remark.  There 
was  perhaps  a  touch,  just  a  touch,  of  gentle  satire 
in  his  tone,  and  a  barely  perceptible  twinkle  in 
his  eye. 

83 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

The  apologies  and  explanations  which  the  visi- 
tor was  naturally  moved  to  present,  viva  voce, 
were  listened  to  with  remarkable  patience.  When 
they  were  over,  the  same  domestic  who  had  come 
out  to  the  carriage  was  pressed  into  service  again 
to  show  the  way  to  a  room  where  hands  could 
be  washed  and  the  dust  of  travel  brushed  from 
one's  coat.  When  these  operations  were  barely 
completed,  the  man  reappeared  to  announce  that 
luncheon  was  served.  More  time  had  been  con- 
sumed in  the  climb  up  the  hills  than  I  had  real- 
ized. It  must  have  been  quite  noon  when  the 
summit  of  the  height  was  reached. 

"You  see  us  in  undress,"  remarked  the  host 
as  we  sat  down  to  table. "  This  will  be  an  informal 
meal." 

The  table  was  garnished  with  flowers.  It  was 
served  by  a  butler  and  footman  in  proper  clothes. 
The  meal  itself  was  done  in  courses,  five  or  six 
of  them.  It  was  the  cosmopolitan  menu,  and  the 
cosmopolitan  service.  Of  the  provincial,  or  even 
of  the  Italian,  there  was  hardly  a  trace. 

"  It  is  a  simple  existence  which  we  lead  here," 
said  the  younger  man,  as  he  helped  himself  to 
one  of  the  elaborate  French  dishes  then  being 
presented  at  his  elbow.  "We  become  peasants 
in  the  summer." 

"  I  am  sorry  to  make  you  come  down  to  our 
humble  fare,"  said  the  host  as  he  watched  one 

84 


COUNTRY  HOUSES 

of  the  men  pour  a  seasoned  vintage  into  my 
glass.  "  But  you  will  soon  be  back  in  civilization 
and  can  make  up,  then,  for  the  privations  of  this 
little  visit." 

I  listened  to  their  exquisite  apologies  and 
smiled.  Would  that  we  might  all  turn  into  peas- 
ants in  the  Sabine  hills  in  summer!  The  humble 
fare  would  not  drive  one  to  a  Roman  pension 
for  something  to  tempt  one's  palate. 

Through  the  open  window,  opposite  us,  a 
breeze  was  blowing  straight  into  the  room  with 
the  freshness  of  early  June.  There  was  a  tonic 
in  every  smallest  breath  of  it.  It  was  an  appetizer 
which  no  cleverest  invention  of  chemists  could 
distantly  approach.  No  wonder  that  the  master 
of  the  place  loved  to  stay  there,  or  wished  to 
have  the  whole  year  summer.  Unlimited  doses 
of  that  pure  atmosphere  had  made  him  the 
vigorous  veteran  that  he  was.  If  the  hospitals  of 
Rome  could  have  been  transported  to  the  spot 
on  some  magic  carpet,  the  business  of  the  phy- 
sicians would  have  been  lost.  Their  patients 
would  have  taken  up  their  beds  and  walked.  The 
institution  would  have  lost  its  tenants. 

The  conversation,  after  wandering  sufficiently 
in  the  tiresome  field  of  the  traveller's  experiences, 
entered  the  more  interesting  domain  of  this  rural 
and  "primitive"  life.  It  became  evident  that  the 
lord  of  the  manor  was  profoundly  absorbed  in 

85 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

the  affairs  of  his  estate.  He  was  evidently  the 
father  of  all  his  tenants,  willing  to  listen  to  their 
unending  stories  about  their  affairs,  ready  to  sym- 
pathize, to  help,  to  dired, — sometimes  to  com- 
mand, when  the  occasion  called  for  it. 

One  could  see  the  Old  Regime  perpetuated 
here.  There  had  been  no  French  revolution  in 
this  secluded  region  of  the  Sabines,  and  no  call 
for  one.  The  peasants  were  still  the  children  of 
the  feudal  lord,  and  willingly  subservient. 

At  the  end  of  the  dejeuner  we  moved  off  to 
explore  the  house — which  was  a  rambling  strud- 
ure  with  an  orderly  nucleus.  The  journey  took 
us  first  into  a  little  cabinet  near  one  of  the  front 
windows  where  there  was  a  colledlion  of  small 
objeds.  Some  coins  were  arranged  there  in  cases. 
On  the  walls  were  drawings  in  pencil  or  in  pen 
and  ink.  Among  them  was  a  small  sketch-portrait 
of  the  baron's  father  by  Sir  Thomas  Lawrence. 

The  little  drawing  showed  a  handsome  face 
with  regularly  cut  features.  The  hair  was  pushed 
back  around  the  face  in  disordered  curls,  like  the 
poetic  locks  of  Byron.  The  man  wore  the  high- 
collared  coat  and  enormous  stock  which  were  in 
vogue  in  the  early  years  of  the  century. 

It  was  a  privilege  to  possess  such  a  thing.  The 

son  of  the  portrait  looked  at  it  fondly,  and  with 

good  right.  He  was  in  the  ad:  of  pointing  out  one 

or  two  trivial  defeds — something  wrong  in  the 

86 


COUNTRY  HOUSES 

eyebrows — when  a  wave  of  brass  came  into  the 
little  room  from  the  open  window.  Looking  out, 
we  could  see  that  a  ring  of  musicians  had  gath- 
ered in  the  square,  twelve  of  them  perhaps.  They 
had  begun  to  execute  one  of  the  popular  marches 
just  then  in  vogue  in  the  larger  towns. 

"Where  did  they  come  from?"  I  naturally 
asked.  It  turned  out  that  they  belonged  to  the 
place.  Out  of  that  infinitesimal  hamlet  the  whole 
company  had  been  mustered.  And  to  the  credit 
of  their  diredor  be  it  said  that  he  had  done  won- 
ders with  his  material.  Their  performance  was 
more  than  passable.  The  men  were  all  in  uniform 
and  presented  a  trim  and  tidy  appearance. 

The  host  and  his  son  were  disposed  to  pass 
over  the  matter  lightly.  "It  is  the  custom  of  the 
place,"  said  the  younger  man.  "When  we  open 
the  house  to  entertain  any  one,  they  usually  come 
out  and  play." 

The  older  man  turned  his  back  to  the  win- 
dow and  continued  his  discussion  of  the  portrait. 
When  he  had  finished  his  criticism,  he  led  the 
way  out  of  the  cabinet  into  the  rooms  beyond. 
One  of  the  servants  followed  him  and  whispered 
something  in  his  ear.  The  baron  turned. 

"Se  vogliono  here  dagli  a  here — if  they  wish 
to  drink,  give  thou  them  to  drink." 

It  ended  the  incident;  though  the  music  con- 
tinued audible  for  some  time — rising  into  sud- 

87 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

den  crescendos  whenever  a  door  was  opened 
behind  us. 

We  had  reached  the  orderly  and  systematic 
part  of  the  house  where  the  rooms  were  large 
and  high,  and  symmetrically  arranged.  The  tour 
of  inspedion  began  with  a  great  central  apart- 
ment, which  communicated  with  others  on  either 
side.  In  a  feudal  castle  it  would  have  been  called 
the  baronial  hall.  Here  it  was  used  as  an  armory. 
Armor  was  arranged  in  cases  and  upon  standing 
frames  on  all  sides. 

Every  species  of  death-dealing  weapon  was  in 
sight,  from  the  battle-axe  of  the  warrior  to  the 
poniard  of  the  assassin,  and  all  epochs  were  rep- 
resented, from  the  primitive  cross-bow  to  the 
repeating  rifle.  "This  is  his  pet  colledtion,"  said 
the  younger  man  to  me,  with  a  nod  toward  his 
father.  "He  is  devoted  to  these  things.  He  is 
always  on  the  lookout  for  new  specimens." 

It  was  curious  to  look  at  the  benevolent  face 
of  the  colledor  and  then  at  his  colledion.  Clearly 
he  would  not  have  willingly  injured  a  fly  walk- 
ing on  the  window-pane,  and  yet  in  this  atmos- 
phere of  battle,  murder,  and  sudden  death,  his 
colledor's  heart  enjoyed  its  fullest  expansions. 

He  was  leading  the  way  toward  some  suits  of 

armor  which  were  set  up  on  lay  figures  as  in  a 

museum.  One  of  them  was  of  queer  design.  "It 

is  Turkish,"  he  explained  as  we  stopped  before 

88 


COUNTRY  HOUSES 

it.  "It  is  a  janissary's  harness.  It  goes  back  to 
the  thirteenth  century." 

The  Oriental  thing  made  one  think  of  Sche- 
herazade and  her  tales.  An  Arabian  knight  seemed 
to  stare  at  one  from  the  open  head-piece.  It  sug- 
gested visions  of  palace  gardens  with  tanks  and 
rose  trees,  of  veiled  ladies  peering  through  lat- 
tices, and  of  a  circle  of  terrible  warriors,  done  up 
in  these  suits  of  steel,  ready  to  punish  an  in- 
truder with  instant  death. 

"You  will  notice  the  minuteness  of  the  work- 
manship," continued  the  speaker,  his  voice  grow- 
ing in  warmth  as  he  went  on.  "We  had  few 
armorers  in  Italy  at  that  epoch  who  could  have 
done  better  work.  The  janissaries  were. some- 
times pitted  against  the  best  soldiers  of  Europe. 
They  were  not  merely  a  household  corps.  They 
had  to  be  well  proteded." 

He  stopped  speaking  for  amoment  and  passed 
his  hand  over  the  steel  coat.  "The  difference  be- 
tween a  good  and  a  bad  piece  of  work  in  those 
days  meant  the  difference  between  having  a  live 
man  in  your  service  after  a  day's  fight,  or  having 
a  dead  man." 

He  spoke  as  if  he  had  been  there  himself,  so 
vivid  to  his  mind  was  this  past  which  his  treasures 
represented.  He  went  on,  from  piece  to  piece, 
moving  around  the  room  irregularly,  as  first  this 
weapon  and  then  thatattraded  him.  Itwasaprivi- 

89 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

lege  to  hear  him  discourse  of  these  deadly  things 
in  that  serene  and  peaceful  voice  of  his.  And  his 
erudition  was  remarkable — or  seemed  so  to  the 
indifferent  knowledge  of  the  merely  curious  ob- 
server. At  some  period  of  his  long  life  he  must 
have  devoted  an  appreciable  portion  of  his  time 
to  the  accumulation  of  this  multitude  of  curious 
fads. 

Among  his  treasures  was  a  cannone  a  mano^  a 
peculiar-looking  gun  which  was  arranged  to  be 
loaded  from  the  breech,  with  a  curious  contrivance 
of  wedges  for  closing  the  aperture.  He  dated  it 
back  to  the  sixteenth  century,  at  an  epoch  when 
the  breech-loading  weapon  is  supposed  to  have 
been  entirely  unknown.  Some  imperfedion  in 
its  working — perhaps  the  imperfedion  of  fir- 
ing both  ways — prevented  the  invention  from 
achieving  the  popularity  as  an  instrument  of  de- 
struction which  it  was  destined  to  gain  later. 
At  any  rate,  the  strange  thing,  as  it  stood  in  his 
colledion,  remained  pradically  unique,  with  no 
pedigree  of  its  own  sort  behind  it,  and  no  imme- 
diate posterity. 

The  son  had  moved  away  from  us  as  we  stood 
looking  at  the  old  piece  of  iron,  and  had  walked 
over  to  a  large  circular  case  in  the  middle  of  the 
room  whose  contents  I  had  not  yet  seen.  "He  is 
looking  at  my  small  hand-arms,"  commented  the 
father,  as  he  turned  a  fond  eye  toward  the  stal- 
90 


COUNTRY  HOUSES 

wart  youth.  "They  are  really  among  the  choicest 
things  that  I  have." 

We  went  over  and  looked  at  the  choice  things. 
They  were  laid  down  flat  under  glass.  Among 
them  were  daggers  of  Oriental  work,  with  handles 
inlaid  with  silver  and  gold.  There  were  other  small 
pieces  with  handles  in  niello,  done  in  Italy  by 
some  master  of  that  form  of  decoration.  And 
beside  these  he  had  brought  together  a  number 
of  elaborate  specimens  from  difi^erent  quarters, 
with  ornamentation  of  turquoises,  coral,  and  other 
precious  substances. 

"Arms  like  these,"  said  the  possessor  of  them 
in  an  afFedionate  tone,  "were  an  indication  of  the 
rank  of  the  wearer.  No  common  soldier  ever 
handled  such  things.  If  he  had  picked  them  up 
as  booty  on  the  field  of  battle,  he  would  prob- 
ably have  gone  and  sold  them.  He  would  not 
have  had  the  presumption  to  wear  them." 

It  was  interesting  to  follow  him  in  his  orbit 
around  the  circular  case  and  listen  to  the  story 
of  the  different  pieces.  Artistically  they  were  the 
gems  of  the  colledion,  and  it  was  proper  that 
they  should  be  enshrined  as  they  were.  When 
we  had  regained  the  starting-point,  the  colledtor 
turned  as  if  to  leave  the  room,  but  changed  his 
mind  and  led  the  way  over  to  a  large  balconied 
window  in  the  centre  of  the  outer  wall. 

The  casement  was  wide  open,  and  the  breeze 

91 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

was  blowing  in  with  a  gentle  current.  The  sky- 
was  cloudless  and  intensely  blue.  We  were  high 
up  in  the  air.  The  hillside  descended  with  a  sud- 
den sweep  beneath  us.  Down,  down  below  was 
the  valley,  tilled  and  cared  for  with  Dutch  mi- 
nuteness; and  on  the  farther  side  of  it  a  young 
mountain  swept  up  grandly.  It  was  one  of  the 
lesser  heights  of  the  Sabines. 

What  a  place  for  defence,  one  instindively  felt. 
The  house  was  hung  up  like  a  Rhine  castle  on 
a  crag.  In  the  Middle  Ages  some  baronial  eagle's 
nest  should  have  been  rudely  fashioned  here. 

"  Down  there,"  said  the  owner  of  the  place  as 
if  reading  my  thoughts,  "you  see  the  founda- 
tions of  the  old  castle."  Following  the  dire6lion 
of  his  eyes,  I  noticed  some  projecting  masses  of 
rugged  masonry,  jutting  forward  on  the  hillside, 
on  which  the  towers  of  some  ancient  stronghold 
might  well  have  been  supported. 

"When  this  house  was  built,"  he  went  on, 
"the  old  one  was  largely  demolished.  But  the 
foundations  were  left.  They  defined  the  shape 
of  the  modern  building.  The  archited:  accommo- 
dated himself  to  them." 

"And  who  was  the  archited?" 

"The  archited:  was  Vignola,"  said  the  chate- 

lain.  "According  to  the  dates  which  appear  in  the 

documents,  he  must  have  come  up  here  the  year 

he  died.  We  believe  it  to  have  been  his  last  work." 

92 


COUNTRY  HOUSES 

I  left  the  window  reludantly.  The  outlook  was 
superb.  But  there  were  other  things  still  to  be 
seen  inside.  To  right  and  left  of  the  armory  were 
lofty  redangular  rooms  forming  part  of  the  state 
suite.  We  explored  their  silent  spaces  as  we  would 
have  walked  through  the  halls  of  a  deserted  tem- 
ple. They  were  quite  tenantless  except  for  the 
trophies  of  ancient  furniture  which  they  con- 
tained. One  of  them  was  the  state  bedchamber. 
It  had  a  great  bed  like  a  catafalque  in  it,  where 
a  long  line  of  dead  notables  had  slept.  The  host 
recited  some  of  their  names  and  titles.  A  cardi- 
nal was  the  last. 

"We  must  go  downstairs,"  he  said  finally, 
when  the  upper  floor  had  been  made  to  yield  up 
all  that  it  possessed  of  interest.  "There  are  a  few 
things  to  see  down  there." 

He  led  the  way  out  into  the  hall  and  down 
the  long  stone  staircase.  At  the  bottom  of  it  we 
entered  a  room  corresponding  to  the  armory. 
And  there  were  other  rooms  arranged  around 
it,  substantially  as  above.  The  spaces  were  con- 
trived like  a  series  of  treasury  vaults.  The  ceilings 
curved  up  from  the  walls  in  massive  stonework. 
The  coin  and  the  archives  of  a  principality  might 
safely  have  been  intrusted  to  their  keeping. 

The  white-haired  guide  led  the  way  through 
a  thick  doorway  into  a  room  lined  with  docu- 
ments in  cases.  It  was  the  Archivio,  The  papers 

93 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

went  back  to  the  Middle  Ages.  The  correspond- 
ence of  the  early  lords  of  the  manor  was  there 
from  1400.  For  several  centuries  the  feudal  lord 
was  local  governor,  and  the  official  records  of 
his  administration,  civil  and  criminal,  were  all 
preserved  there. 

A  number  of  other  rooms  were  traversed, 
among  the  last  of  them  being  the  library — a 
room  close  to  the  eastern  wall  with  windows  look- 
ing out  on  the  piduresque  Sabine  summits.  The 
shelves  presented  a  solid  array  of  well-bound  vol- 
umes, which  one  would  have  been  glad,  if  time 
had  permitted,  to  examine  in  detail.  What  one 
saw  in  the  cursory  glance,  was  that  education  and 
even  bookish ness  had  gotten  a  foothold  some- 
where in  the  recent  generations  of  the  family, 
which  in  earlier  generations  would  have  despised 
such  things  as  the  proper  province  of  priests  and 
clerks. 

During  all  our  peregrinations  the  son  followed 
us  faithfully.  He  knew  all  the  story  by  heart, 
and  at  points  where  he  suspeded  that  his  father's 
Italian  was  becoming  obscure  he  supplemented 
it  in  French.  The  role  of  a  German  would  have 
really  fitted  him  better  than  the  role  of  a  French- 
man. His  appearance  was  Teutonic.  He  was  blond 
and  of  large  stature.  His  system  evidently  de- 
manded unlimited  quantities  of  fresh  air  and  out- 
of-door  exercise.  He  had  the  general  asped:  of 
94 


COUNTRY  HOUSES 

rosy  physical  robustness  which  one,  rightly  or 
wrongly,  associates  more  with  the  Teutonic  than 
the  Latin  nature. 

Although  he  cherished  a  fondness  for  Rome 
in  the  winter,  the  son  was  clearly  quite  as  much 
interested  in  the  management  of  the  estate  and  in 
the  country  life  as  his  father.  The  little  barony 
was  large  enough  to  demand  the  attention  of 
more  than  one  overseer  for  its  proper  care.  It 
seemed  to  include  all  the  surrounding  country, 
within  sight  of  the  chateau.  Off  on  another  hill, 
a  mile  away,  another  house  was  pointed  out  to 
me  where  the  family  often  resided  during  their 
villeggiatura^  in  preference  to  the  house  we  were 
in.  It  was  more  conveniently  situated  for  look- 
ing after  things  and  more  modern  in  its  appoint- 
ments than  the  large  palazzo.  The  charm  of  the 
old  palace  was  its  consistent  antiquity.  It  was  a 
picture  of  the  past,  perfedly  preserved.  Every  de- 
tail was  in  its  place.  Not  an  anachronism  showed 
itself 

Just  here  I  ought  to  say  that  it  is  not  only  the 
Italian  past  which  has  produced  these  harmo- 
nious houses.  The  present  is  still  creating  them. 
I  have  in  mind  one  in  the  environs  of  Perugia 
which  was  designed  by  an  artist,  now  living,  for 
his  own  occupancy,  and  which  is  deserving  of 
some  description  because  of  the  exceptional  taste 
brought  to  bear  upon  every  detail  of  its  construc- 

95 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

tion.  The  builder  happened  to  be  born  with  a  title 
— which  under  some  circumstances  might  have 
efFedually  prevented  any  serious  study  of  art  or 
any  substantial  achievement  in  any  diredion.  But 
he  succeeded  in  surmounting  the  obstacles  which 
his  caste  put  in  his  way,  went  through  a  system- 
atic course  of  art  instrudion  at  Rome,  and  when 
his  talent  was  ripe  yielded  very  naturally  to  the 
temptation  to  construd  for  himself  a  home  which 
should  be  beautiful  in  every  particular.  He  does 
not  talk  very  much  about  the  past  of  his  family 
and  I  do  not  know  whether  his  present  villa  is 
built  on  an  ancestral  site  or  a  new  one.  But  it  is 
enough  to  say,  so  far  as  the  mere  situation  is  con- 
cerned, that  it  is  an  exceptionally  fine  one — not 
quite  so  high  as  Perugia,  but  still  high  up,  and 
far  enough  away  from  the  town  so  that  the  city 
itself  does  not  materially  obstruct  the  view. 

As  one  approaches  the  villa  it  seems  to  in- 
clude, in  its  piduresque  grouping  of  higher  and 
lower  roofs,  a  chapel — or  what  one  would  judge 
to  be  such  from  its  peculiar  contour.  The  roof  is 
higher  than  that  of  the  other  buildings  and  termi- 
nates in  an  acute  gable.  It  has,  also,  a  very  high 
mullioned  window  of  strongly  ecclesiastical  char- 
a6ter  at  one  end,  which  would  tend  to  emphasize 
the  chapel-look.  This  annex  to  the  villa  proves  to 
be,  however,  a  studio — a  place  dedicated  to  the 
cult  of  art  and  not  of  religion.  It  is  a  very  lofty 

96 


COUNTRY  HOUSES 

room,  open  up  to  the  very  apex  of  the  roof,  in- 
side, without  any  flat  ceiling  to  conceal  its  fine 
construdive  lines.  The  great  mullioned  window 
gives  the  painter  his  light,  and  opposite  it  is  a 
huge  fireplace  designed  on  a  scale  large  enough 
to  make  it  correspond  with  the  rest  of  the  room. 
The  same  intelligence  which  controlled  the  gen- 
eral form  of  the  studio  has  shaped  its  lesser  fit- 
tings, and  has  made  all  the  accessories,  so  far  as 
possible,  mediaeval.  I  will  not  say  that  the  chairs 
look  precisely  like  those  which  the  people  of  the 
Gothic  age  used  to  torture  themselves  with  in 
their  moments  of  relaxation.  They  are  somewhat 
more  comfortable — and  the  slight  anachronism 
which  shows  itself  in  this  detail  of  the  fittings  is 
readily  pardoned  on  that  account.  Neither  is  the 
lamp,  supported  on  its  twisted  column,  a  medi- 
aeval mechanism,  but  the  pillar  itself  is  old  and 
in  keeping  with  the  other  appointments  of  the 
place.  Above  the  very  high  wainscot,  on  the  flat 
surface  of  the  upper  wall,  the  padrone  di  casa 
has  painted  with  his  own  hand  some  composi- 
tions in  the  style  of  mediaeval  tapestries  which 
one  studies  with  interest.  They  are  ingeniously 
and  successfully  done.  They  are  of  course  only 
imitations,  but  the  imitation  is  cleverly  executed 
and  helps  to  sustain  the  mediaeval  charader  which 
it  was  the  effort  of  the  artist  to  impress  upon  the 
place. 

97 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

Adjoining  the  studio  is  another  room  which 
presents  a  harmony  in  a  different  key.  It  is  the 
library,  all  done  in  browns  and  yellows — the 
tone  of  yellow,  which  is  not  exadlly  yellow,  being 
supplied  by  the  vellum-backed  books  on  the 
shelves,  and  the  brown  by  the  dark  wood  of  the 
cases  and  of  the  furniture.  Over  the  fireplace, 
in  order  not  to  break  the  harmony  of  the  general 
color  scheme,  the  inventor  of  the  decoration  has 
placed  the  portrait  of  one  of  his  ancestors,  done 
with  a  hot  iron,  as  one  ascertains  on  examining 
it  closely,  though  at  a  short  distance  the  peculiar 
way  in  which  the  pidure  has  been  produced  does 
not  declare  itself,  so  soft  are  the  tones  and  so 
cleverly  is  the  work  executed.  The  place  con- 
tains a  number  of  treasures  of  early  printing — 
particularly  German  books.  The  "librarian"  has 
felt  a  special  interest  in  the  early  masters  of  cop- 
per-plate engraving  and  has  concentrated  his  col- 
lecting fervor  principally  on  the  prints  of  that 
period. 

The  house  contains  other  interesting  rooms 
of  which  I  will  only  mention  one — and  that  is 
the  chapel  which  one  reaches  by  a  flight  of  stone 
steps  descending  from  the  studio  and  leading  to 
a  sort  of  crypt.  This  crypt,  or  chapel,  is  a  heavily 
vaulted  room  which  suggests  certain  parts  of  the 
lower  church  at  Assisi.  In  the  centre  is  an  ar- 
chaic altar,  provided  with  archaic  candelabra  and 

98 


COUNTRY  HOUSES 

other  Gothic  accessories.  Over  the  steps  of  the 
altar  has  been  thrown  a  piece  of  tapestry  carpet, 
done  in  the  old  flame-pattern,  so  called.  Above 
one's  head  is  a  heavy  vault  which  is  entirely  cov- 
ered, as  are  the  lunettes  of  the  upper  wall,  with 
frescos  in  the  style  of  Giotto  and  his  school. 
These  decorations  are  not  large,  but  they  are  in- 
geniously done  and  are  excellent  pieces  of  mim- 
icry. The  artist-master  of  the  house  has  made 
himself  a  reputation  for  pidures  of  quite  a  differ- 
ent type — pictures  which  represent  certain  phases 
of  modern  life  painted  in  a  purely  modern  spirit; 
but  in  this  reproduction  of  an  old  chapel  he  has 
turned  his  hand  not  only  to  the  old  but  to  the 
very  oldest  form  of  mediaeval  art,  and  has  ac- 
quitted himself  with  the  skill  of  an  accomplished 
ador.  The  saints  have  the  wan  and  holy  faces 
of  the  primitive  school.  They  have  the  same 
disks  of  gold  behind  their  heads.  They  are  done 
in  colors  in  which  one  deteds  the  degeneration 
of  tones  and  the  deadening  of  tints  charaderistic 
of  extreme  age.  One  rubs  one's  eyes  for  a  sec- 
ond after  entering  this  holy  place  and  wonders 
whether  a  fragment  of  genuine  antiquity  has 
not  been  transferred  here  bodily  from  Assisi 
and  worked  into  the  foundations  of  this  modern 
house. 

The  man  who  has  created  all  these  things  is 
naturally  a  man  with  an  interesting  personality, 

99 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

which  comes  out  in  his  discourse — a  discourse 
covering  a  wide  range  of  subjeds  but  with  a  con- 
tinuous gravitation  toward  the  artistic.  In  the 
explorations  which  we  made  together  of  the  ob- 
jeds  of  interest  in  Perugia,  the  town,  this  pref- 
erence revealed  itself.  The  artistic  history  of  the 
place  was  unfolded  by  him  in  successive  instal- 
ments, as  it  was  called  out  by  the  successive 
objeds  of  interest  which  were  woven  into  the 
round — commencing  with  the  ancient  church 
of  San  Pietro  on  the  south  and  ending  with  the 
still  more  ancient  church  of  Sant'Angelo  on  the 
north.  The  permanent  guides  in  these  churches, 
and  in  the  museums,  recognized  him  as  an  au- 
thority, and  although  he  occasionally  appealed 
to  them  for  information  it  was  apparent  that  he 
did  so  from  courtesy  and  not  because  they  had 
anything  to  tell  him  which  he  did  not  already 
know.  When  I  do  not  think  of  him  in  his  ar- 
tistic home,  in  the  midst  of  the  beautiful  things 
of  his  own  creation,  he  comes  back  to  me  with 
a  background  of  some  one  of  these  Perugian 
sights,  helping  the  foreigner  to  a  knowledge  of 
what  is  best  worth  seeing,  and  supplementing 
the  visible  with  the  accessory  fads  which  were 
most  essential  to  their  full  enjoyment. 

The  fascinating  villa,  of  which  I  have  given 
such  an  imperfed  description,  proves,  if  one 
needs  proofs,  that  the  art  of  building  attradive 

100 


COUNTRY  HOUSES 

country  houses  is  not  a  lost  one  in  Italy.  Per- 
haps by  force  of  contrast  it  stands  associated  in 
my  mind  with  another  which  belonged  to  the 
real  and  not  the  simulated  past  and  which  had 
a  peculiar  and  unique  charader  of  its  own.  It 
was  the  property  of  a  Venetian  gentleman  of  a 
very  old  family  and  was  situated  in  a  fertile  and 
healthful  distridt  in  the  province  of  Treviso. 
Many  of  the  Venetian  patricians  have  villas  in 
that  neighborhood  and  in  the  season  ofvilkggia- 
tura  they  betake  themselves  gladly  to  these  in- 
land resorts  for  the  refreshment  of  not  seeing 
water  everywhere,  of  not  listening  to  the  gondo- 
liers' calls,  and  of  not  doing  the  narrow  round 
of  fatiguing  things  which  their  urban  life  ties 
them  down  to. 

This  place  was  not  very  far  distant  from 
Asolo.  One  could  indeed  drive  down  to  it  in 
the  course  of  a  half-hour  or  so,  from  that  small 
village  on  the  hill  which  has  been  saved  from 
subsidence  into  nonentity  by  its  connexion  with 
a  queen  and  a  poet.  The  plain  below  Asolo  is 
watered  by  a  shallow  and  narrow  stream  flow- 
ing through  a  simple  farming-country.  And  the 
country  place  to  which  I  refer  may  have  been 
originally  only  one  of  these  farms  or  an  aggre- 
gation of  them  under  one  ownership.  At  some 
time  or  other,  however,  the  proprietor  of  the 
place  saw  fit  to  build  a  rather  commodious  house 

lOI 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

upon  it,  and  to  this  house  the  descendants  of 
that  proprietor  still  repair  annually  when  Venice 
becomes  monotonous  and  a  return  to  terra  fir  ma 
offers  the  prospe6t  of  an  agreeable  change. 

As  one  inquires  one's  way  along  the  country 
roads  to  this  residence,  the  language  which  one 
meets  is  invariably  the  Italian  of  the  region,  a  not 
absolutely  incomprehensible  dialed,  but  still 
something  which  is  local  and  savors  of  rusticity. 
Once  across  the  threshold  of  the  mansion  itself, 
however,  the  speech  which  salutes  one  is  French; 
and  the  proffering  of  this  super-civilized  tongue 
at  this  spot  marks  the  important  line  which  has 
been  crossed.  The  master  of  the  house  knows 
Italian  of  course.  It  is  his  native  tongue — his 
everyday  speech  with  nine  out  of  ten  of  the  per- 
sons whom  he  meets.  But  when  he  wishes  to 
emphasize  the  fadl  that  it  is  not  his  world, — that 
he  belongs  to  something  different, — he  has  only 
to  drop  or  rise  into  the  international  language  to 
effe6lually  mark  the  distinction  and  define  his 
own  proper  place. 

In  the  interior  of  this  house  there  were  many 
things  which  suggested  the  palaces  of  Venice 
proper,  though  with  the  modifications  which 
would  be  inevitable  under  the  circumstances. 
There  was  the  same  general  redangular  plan 
and  the  same  broad  hall  running  through  the 
house  from  end  to  end,  upon  which  all  the  rooms 

102 


COUNTRY  HOUSES 

opened.  Just  such  an  arrangement  exists  in  the 
well-known  palace  of  the  Albrizzi  family,  to  cite 
one  among  numerous  Venetian  examples  of  this 
system  of  dividing  up  the  interior.  What  was 
very  different  in  this  country  house  was  that  the 
doors  at  either  end  of  the  hall — they  were  glass 
doors — opened  diredly  upon  the  ground  and 
were  separated  from  it  by  only  a  single  step. 
The  idea  was  evidently  to  make  the  place  as  ap- 
proachable and  informal  as  possible.  It  was  to 
have  the  spirit  of  a  garden  house — a  casino — 
and  the  occupant  of  it  was  to  feel  that  the  out- 
of-door  life  which  he  had  come  into  the  country 
to  seek,  was  to  be  gained  by  a  single  step  from 
the  nominal  confinement  of  "indoors." 

As  for  the  grounds  themselves,  they  were  as 
flat  as  a  floor  and  they  perhaps  suffered  from 
the  monotony  which  was  necessarily  attendant 
upon  this  unbroken  horizontalism.  Only  such 
variety  of  effed  was  possible  as  could  be  secured 
by  the  ingenious  laying  out  of  walks  and  the 
skilful  arrangement  of  shrubbery.  One  of  the 
ancestors  of  the  present  owner  had  taken,  evi- 
dently, considerable  pains  with  these  grounds, 
but  in  the  last  two  or  three  generations  com- 
paratively little  had  been  done  toward  keeping 
them  up,  and  they  had  the  same  air  of  gentle 
and  poetic  decadence  which  we  notice  in  the  old 
patrician  palaces  of  Venice  itself.  The  same  causes 

103 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

had  been  at  work  in  each  place  and  had  inevitably 
brought  about  the  same  results. 

The  opportunities  for  diversifying  the  gardens 
about  an  Italian  villa  are  of  course  far  greater 
where  the  house  is  built  upon  rising  ground,  with 
convenient  hillsides  to  create  the  possibility  of 
terraces  and  hanging  gardens  and  cascades.  Not 
far  from  Rome,  at  Viterbo,  we  found  a  fine  old 
villa  belonging  to  the  Lante  family  which  had  all 
these  elaborate  features  worked  out  in  a  uniquely 
interesting  manner.  The  villa  stood  upon  a  shelf 
of  a  hillside  and  was  curiously  designed  in  two 
separate  blocks  in  order  not  to  interfere  with  the 
perfed:  symmetry  and  effediveness  of  the  water- 
works which  came  down  the  slope  between  the 
two  divisions  of  the  mansion.  This  breaking  up 
of  the  villa  into  two  entirely  detached  cubes  was 
something  which  we  had  not  observed  elsewhere 
and  which  showed  how  much  more  importance 
was  attached  to  the  terraces  and  the  cascades  than 
to  the  residence  for  which  they  were  supposed 
to  form  the  setting. 

Standing  on  the  house-terrace  and  looking 
down  on  the  lower  level  toward  the  entrance, 
one  observed  a  peculiar  effed  of  water-composi- 
tion, suggesting  an  inundated  garden.  In  the 
centre  rose  a  high  circular  basin  with  a  jet  of 
water  in  the  middle,  surrounded  by  carved  fig- 
ures and  surmounted  by  a  sort  of  canopy.  And 
104 


COUNTRY  HOUSES 

below  this  circular  basin  the  central  space  of  the 
garden  was  converted  into  a  large  tank,  filled 
brimming  full  of  opaque  and  rather  yellow  fluid, 
entirely  shutting  off  the  approach  to  the  middle 
jet  except  by  narrow,  balustraded  causeways. 
Some  little  tufts  of  green  resting  on  the  surface 
of  the  muddy  tanks  simulated  islands,  and  there 
was  place  for  more  greenery — which  however 
was  not  utilized — in  the  vases  placed  at  regular 
intervals  upon  the  parapets.  Outside  of  this  was 
a  broad  extent  of  terra  firmUy  with  an  elaborate 
pattern  of  neatly  trimmed  box  arranged  in  a 
geometrical  design  on  fine  gravel.  And  still  out- 
side of  this  was  a  high  hedge,  flanking  the  en- 
trance gate,  and  overtopped  by  the  awkward 
houses  of  the  neighboring  village  which  intru- 
sively pushed  themselves  up  to  the  very  park 
gates. 

The  waterworks  in  front  of  the  villa  were 
arranged  with  reference  to  broad  levels  and  re- 
flecting surfaces,  but  on  the  higher  land,  behind, 
everything  was  disposed  with  a  view  to  more 
sparkling  and  vivacious  effedts.  From  an  upper 
terrace  a  stairway  descended  in  a  double  flight, 
and  a  broad  basin,  laid  out  in  a  fan-shaped  curve, 
swept  from  the  base  of  the  steps  on  one  side  to 
the  base  on  the  other.  Above  this  lower  basin 
were  smaller  ones,  of  the  same  form,  dwindling 
to  a  mere  cup  at  the  top.  The  whole  composi- 

105 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

tion  was  liberally  supplied  with  water.  It  gushed 
out  everywhere.  Even  the  parapet  of  the  stairs 
was  converted  into  an  open  conduit,  and  the 
vases,  placed  at  intervals  along  it,  were  utilized 
as  cups  for  jets.  I  do  not  know  who  the  designer 
of  this  elaborate  water-pid:ure  may  have  been, 
but,  whoever  he  was,  he  was  a  man  with  a  fertile 
brain.  His  inventive  powers  were  not  exhausted 
by  the  portion  of  the  complicated  spedlacle  which 
I  have  described,  for  there  were  still  other  feat- 
ures, introduced  at  other  points,  and  extending 
through  the  upper  gardens  to  regions  quite  out 
of  sight  of  the  house. 

The  cascades  of  the  Villa  Lante  are  perhaps 
outdone  by  those  at  Frascati,  where  the  hillside 
rises  still  more  abruptly  and  where  the  landscape 
gardener  found  conditions  fairly  unrivalled  else- 
where for  the  exhibition  of  his  skill  and  taste. 
In  the  grounds  of  the  Villa  Torlonia  one  moves 
from  level  to  level  with  the  delight  with  which 
one  turns  over  leaf  after  leaf  of  a  cleverly  written 
book.  Some  novelty  always  awaits  one  on  the 
next  page — or  the  next  terrace.  These  fountains 
must  have  been  superb  in  their  prime,  but  they 
are  perhaps  more  touchingly  beautiful  in  their 
fern-overgrown  decadence.  They  may  have  been 
gorgeous  when  the  masonry  was  fresh  and  sharp 
and  new,  and  when  every  pipe  performed  its 
fundtion,  but  they  possess,  now,  a  poetry  in  their 
1 06 


Grounds  of  the  Villa  Torlonia  at  Frascati 


COUNTRY  HOUSES 

decline  which  is  something  better  than  the  crude 
magnificence  of  their  earlier  days.  Let  me  leave 
the  reader  at  this  point  where  he  is  certainly 
at  home — for  all  who  know  Italy  know  these 
sumptuous  gardens  scarcely  an  hour  from  Rome 
— and  end  these  random  recolledions  of  Italian 
villas  at  the  spot  where  the  art  of  villa-building 
first  made  its  timid  beginnings  and  where  it  still 
shows  its  ripest  accomplishments. 


107 


ROYAL  HOMES 


CHAPTER  V 
ROYAL  HOMES 

ON  a  certain  morning  I  found  myself  roll- 
ing rapidly  northward  over  the  flat,  but 
not  unattradlive,  country  which  extends 
from  Milan  toward  the  Lakes.  My  companion 
in  the  railway  carriage  was  a  Milanese  acquaint- 
ance who  had  given  me  some  assistance  in  ar- 
ranging the  details  of  this  particular  expedition 
and  whose  special  knowledge  of  people  and  things 
in  this  region  would,  I  was  sure,  contribute  to 
the  profit  and  enjoyment  which  I  should  derive 
from  it.  The  train  was  moving  toward  Como, 
but  our  tickets  did  not  read  to  that  point.  Our 
destination  was  Monza,  and  it  was  to  explore  the 
royal  villa  situated  there  that  we  had  put  aside 
other  occupations  for  the  day  and  planned  this 
particular  excursion  into  the  country. 

Monza  is  not  a  name  which  signifies  much  to 
the  tourist,  but  it  has  been  for  a  number  of  years 
— or  was  until  the  date  of  the  late  tragedy — 
the  Potsdam,  the  Versailles,  and  the  Windsor  of 
the  Italian  Court.  There  is  no  royal  family  in  the 
world  which  is  so  profusely,  so  superabundantly, 
provided  with  palaces  as  the  Italian  royal  family. 
In  superseding  all  the  numerous  petty  govern- 

III 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

ments  into  which  the  peninsula  of  Italy  was  sub- 
divided before  the  Unification,  they  succeeded  to 
all  the  palaces,  villas,  and  castles  of  the  dispos- 
sessed kings,  princes,  and  dukes.  But  out  of  all 
this  multitude  of  palatial  residences  the  one  which 
was  chosen  by  King  Humbert  and  Queen  Mar- 
gherita  for  their  especial  home  was  not  a  royal 
palace  at  all,  but  the  large  and  roomy  villa  built 
toward  the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century  for 
the  Austrian  governor  of  Lombardy.  The  other 
palaces  were  abandoned  or  visited  rarely.  Monza 
became  the  preferred  retreat  toward  which  the 
royal  mind  turned  with  the  most  fondness  and  to 
which  the  sovereigns  hastily  betook  themselves 
whenever  the  temporary  suspension  of  govern- 
mental duties  at  Rome  permitted  a  flight  from 
the  capital. 

I  have  no  photograph  of  the  exterior  of  the 
villa  and  do  not  know  that  it  would  look  par- 
ticularly well  in  a  photograph.  The  building  has 
a  large  mass  in  the  centre  with  two  projecting 
wings  which  come  forward  so  as  to  form  a  sort 
of  court  surrounded  on  three  sides.  All  around 
it  is  a  great  park,  partly  flat  and  partly  undu- 
lating, which  is  for  the  most  part  left  like  an 
English  park,  without  artificial  gardening.  The 
trees  are  old  and  fine.  The  grass,  at  certain  sea- 
sons, has  the  verdure  of  English  turf  There  are 
extensive  walks  and  drives  on  the  estate,  which 

112 


ROYAL  HOMES 

the  occupants  of  the  house  can  enjoy  without 
crossing  the  confines  of  the  park  or  encounter- 
ing any  living  person  except  the  gardeners,  for- 
esters, and  faithful  serving  folk  who  inhabit  the 
demesne. 

Inside  of  the  house  there  is  a  pervading  air 
of  home  comfort.  It  has  the  English  asped,  as 
the  park  has.  Indeed  the  whole  establishment  is 
not  very  different  from  some  of  the  larger  Eng- 
lish country  houses.  We  were  received  at  the  en- 
trance— not  the  great  state  entrance  but  one  of 
the  minor  entrances — by  a  certain  cavalier e  who 
was  in  charge  of  the  place  in  the  absence  of  the 
family.  At  that  moment  he  was  the  head  person 
in  the  establishment.  He  was  dressed  in  the  plain 
clothes  of  a  gentleman  and  not  in  the  red  and 
gold  worn  by  the  imposing  fundionaries  who 
play  the  part  of  Cerberus  at  the  gates  of  the  royal 
houses.  Under  his  lead  we  traversed  the  rooms, 
in  a  long  sequence,  and  were  given  the  oppor- 
tunity which  the  traveller,  who  is  pushed  and 
pulled  through  state  apartments  with  the  miscel- 
laneous public  of  a  show-day,  does  not  have,  to 
observe  works  of  art  and  other  interesting  objeds 
in  detail. 

This  villa  at  Monza  was  the  home  of  Eugene 
Beauharnais  when  he  was  Napoleon's  viceroy 
in  Italy,  and  from  the  first  was  occupied  by  per- 
sons of  taste  who  must  have  understood  the  art 

"3 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

— the  somewhat  difficult  art — of  dealing  with 
suites  of  great  rooms  in  such  a  way  as  to  make 
them  appear  possible  places  to  live  in.  But  how- 
ever much  may  have  been  done  by  the  predeces- 
sors of  the  Savoy  family,  those  clever  conquerors 
of  Italian  territory  and  Italian  hearts  did,  and 
have  done,  more.  It  was  particularly  from  Queen 
Margherita,  a  person  of  exceptional  taste,  and 
more  than  half  an  artist,  that  the  house  received 
the  precise  shaping  of  attradiveness  which  it  pos- 
sessed while  she  continued  to  occupy  it.  Her  own 
judgment  must  have  ordered  matters  in  detail, 
even  to  the  disposition  of  the  pidhires  and  the 
placing  of  the  furniture.  In  the  resultant  effedts 
one  could  see  what  a  person  of  rare  taste  and 
refinement  could  do  toward  home-making  on  an 
ample  scale,  and  appreciate  the  possibility  of 
producing  really  homelike  effeds  under  circum- 
stances which  might  well  seem  to  render  it  an 
impossibility. 

Our  route  took  us  through  a  large  salon  which 
had  been  recently  decorated  in  a  style  of  some- 
what cold  sumptuousness,  for  the  sake  of  mak- 
ing a  place  for  some  great  tapestries  which  had 
lain  long  unused  and  which,  it  was  felt,  ought 
to  be  utilized  somewhere  in  the  house;  but  just 
beyond  this  slightly  rigid  drawing-room  was  the 
library,  wherein  one  inhaled  quite  a  different  at- 
mosphere. It  may  be  that  there  was  a  colledion 
114 


ROYAL  HOMES 

of  books  already  installed  in  the  house  before  it 
passed  into  the  hands  of  its  recent  occupants, 
but  if  there  were  old  books  on  the  shelves  there 
were  also  many  modern  and  recent  ones  dating 
from  the  occupancy  of  the  late  sovereign.  Queen 
Margherita's  patronage  of  both  art  and  letters 
was  a  matter,  not  simply  of  royal  policy,  but  of 
genuine  personal  interest.  Books  flowed  in  upon 
her,  in  choice  editions  and  in  rich  bindings,  from 
the  writers  who  admired  her  and  to  whom  she  had 
given  encouragement  and  praise ;  and  others  must 
have  been  purchased  in  large  numbers  to  supple- 
ment and  complete  this  interesting  and  valuable 
colledion.  A  balcony  had  been  built  around  the 
room, — which  was  high  enough  to  admit  it,  al- 
though not  one  of  those  rather  cheerless  apart- 
ments where  the  ceiling  is  so  high  as  to  give  the 
effed:  of  a  hall  instead  of  a  room, — and  in  this 
way  it  had  been  possible  to  double  the  book- 
storage  space,  and  to  tapestry  the  walls,  clear  to 
the  cornice,  with  that  most  satisfying  and  most 
decorative  of  all  tapestries — well-bound  books. 
As  we  went  on  through  the  succession  of 
rooms,  we  came  into  the  so-called  hall  of  paint- 
ings, which  might  suggest  one  of  the  dreary,  va- 
cant apartments  in  the  old  palaces  where  a  gilt 
console  table  or  two,  with  a  gilt  chair  on  either 
side  of  it  against  the  wall,  constitutes  the  only 
sign  of  human  occupation.  In  this  case,  however, 

115 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

the  anticipations  which  one  might  form  on  the 
strength  of  the  name  were  not  supported  by  the 
fad:.  The  room  was  not  very  large,  nor  very  high, 
and  its  furnishings  were  not  of  the  cold  and  rigid 
order  at  all.  Moreover,  on  its  walls,  instead  of  the 
expected  canvases  by  the  dead  and  the  gone, — 
which,  beautiful  as  they  may  be,  fail  to  chime  in 
with  ideas  of  living,  breathing  modern  existence, 
—  there  were  glimpses  of  Venice  done  in  a  match- 
less manner  by  a  certain  painter  whom  Queen 
Margherita  had  personally  protected  and  encour- 
aged; and  there  were  other  squares  of  color  which 
belonged  to  the  life  of  yesterday  if  not  of  to-day, 
and  which  were  fresh  and  palpitating,  as  well  as 
animated  by  incontestable  elements  of  artistic 
merit. 

Another  step  or  two  took  one  into  the  salon 
which  was  the  queen's  living-room  and  which 
contained,  naturally,  more  objeds  of  intimate 
personal  interest  than  any  of  the  apartments 
which  we  had  traversed  before.  Her  writing-desk 
was  here,  with  photographs  of  the  persons  who 
stood  nearest  to  her.  The  fine  piano  was  close 
to  it,  and  in  the  hollow  of  the  curving  side  was 
a  broad  and  low  divan  built  on  lines  which  sug- 
gested luxurious  comfort.  In  this  room,  too,  was 
one  of  the  interesting  memorials  of  the  silver 
wedding  of  1 8  93 ,  in  the  shape  of  a  graceful  statue 
in  silver,  representing  Italy  holding  the  shield 
116 


ROYAL  HOMES 

of  the  House  of  Savoy,  which  was  presented  to 
Humbert  and  Margherita  by  Emperor  WilHam. 
Moving  past  a  screen  with  a  glass  top,  one  came 
to  the  door  of  the  king's  personal  den — a  smaller 
room,  with  simple,  substantial,  masculine  fur- 
nishings, and  pictures  on  the  walls  which  showed 
his  fondness  for  dogs,  horses,  and  healthful  out- 
of-door  sports;  and  through  another  door  one 
gained  the  queen's  bedchamber,  large,  roomy,  and 
airy,  hung  with  damask  in  a  tone  of  subdued 
green  and  commanding  from  its  windows  a  wide 
view  over  the  sweeping  levels  of  the  park. 

The  flawless  taste  of  the  occupant  of  this 
apartment  was  made  apparent  in  every  detail  of 
its  decorations  and  appointments.  The  royal  gilt 
bedstead  was  conspicuously  absent.  In  its  stead 
was  a  low,  broad  couch  whose  frame  was  entirely 
covered  with  damask  of  the  same  tint  as  that  on 
the  walls,  and  which  was  overhung  by  a  canopy 
with  draperies  of  the  same  hue,  pulled  back  and 
fastened  in  such  a  way  as  not  to  cut  off  a  breath 
of  the  fresh  air  with  which  the  room  was  bounti- 
fully supplied  from  the  great  windows  opening 
on  the  park.  On  the  wall  opposite  the  windows 
was  the  incomparable  Madonna  by  Barabino, 
which  is  perhaps  the  best  known  of  any  modern 
Italian  pidlure.  Queen  Vidoria  also  had  at  Os- 
borne a  Madonna  by  Barabino,  but  it  was  not 
equal  to  this  superb  rendering  of  the  old  and  ever 

117 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

new  subjed  belonging  to  Queen  Margherita. 
The  pidlure  at  Monza  is  the  one  which  shows 
the  Madonna  seated  upon  a  marble  bench  with 
the  whole  upper  part  of  her  figure  swathed  in 
white  draperies  which  are  passed  over  the  head 
and  drawn  closely  together  under  the  chin.  It 
was,  I  think,  the  only  painting — ^^certainly  the 
only  large  painting — in  the  room,  and  its  assign- 
ment to  this  privileged  spot  showed  very  clearly 
the  value  placed  upon  it  by  its  fortunate  owner. 
Afterward  we  were  shown  through  many  other 
rooms,  where  the  personal  note  was  less  marked, 
and  on  the  upper  floor  we  saw  the  suite  where 
the  Emperor  William  had  been  lodged,  and  other 
rooms  where  the  princes  of  the  Savoy  family  slept 
when  they  were  at  Monza — all  of  them  marked 
with  a  small  card  on  the  wall  beside  the  door — 
a  rather  necessary  precaution  when  the  corridors 
were  so  long,  and  the  doors,  as  they  succeeded 
each  other,  so  precisely  alike.  These  rooms  were 
not  occupied  enough  by  the  persons  for  whom 
they  were  reserved  to  acquire  any  individuality. 
Their  appointments  were  simple  and  modern, 
the  walls  being  hung  with  some  unobtrusive  stuff 
which  was  repeated  in  the  bed  draperies  and  at 
the  windows.  One  noted  in  every  room  a  writing- 
table  and  a  portfolio,  with  the  stamped  paper  of 
the  villa  ready  for  use.  And  at  the  foot  of  each 
bed  were  the  invariable  two  chairs,  facing  like 
ii8 


ROYAL  HOMES 

silent  sentinels  toward  the  sleeper,  which  are  as 
necessary  in  every  well-regulated  state  bedcham- 
ber as  the  two  carahinieri  at  a  well-regulated 
railway  station. 

I  have  seleded  this  especial  royal  residence  for 
mention  and  description  because  it  is  not  shown 
to  the  public,  and  what  may  here  have  been 
said  of  it  is  therefore  not  simply  a  recounting 
of  what  every  one  sees  and  of  what  others  have 
described.  I  should  not  myself  have  been  per- 
mitted to  cross  its  threshold  if  it  had  not  been 
that  all  its  occupants  were  drawn  away  to  Rome, 
just  at  that  time,  by  an  important  event,  demand- 
ing imperatively  the  presence  of  every  member 
of  the  royal  family — the  marriage  of  the  present 
king  and  queen,  which  took  place  in  1896.  As 
I  left  Rome  to  hurry  by  express  northward,  the 
streets  of  the  capital  were  even  then  being  deco- 
rated with  banners  and  with  arches  of  gas-lights, 
for  the  reception  of  the  bride  who  was  momently 
expeded  from  Bari.  The  announcement  of  the 
betrothal  which  led  to  this  marriage  put  an  end 
to  many  surmises  as  to  who  might  be  destined 
to  wear  the  robes  of  queen,  in  this  third  genera- 
tion of  the  Savoy  princes  to  ascend  the  Italian 
throne.  Newspapers  and  private  rumors  had  con- 
nected the  youthful  Victor  Emmanuel  with  a 
long  list  of  possible  consorts — even  with  an 
English  one — before  the  much-discussed  ques- 

119 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

tion  was  finally  set  at  rest  by  the  announcement 
of  the  prince's  own  decision  in  the  matter.  At 
Rome  the  advent  of  the  bride  was  preceded  by 
the  exhibition  of  her  photograph  everywhere, 
— a  face  well  calculated  to  win  the  sympathies 
of  her  prospedive  subjedls.  It  was  virtually  the 
Princess  Elena  who  brought  the  Montenegrine 
family  into  the  view  of  western  Europe — so 
little  does  that  self-centred  world  concern  itself 
in  general  with  the  persons  and  the  events  of 
the  remote  Balkan  states.  But  it  is  worth  while 
to  note  that  hers  was  not  the  first  important 
marriage  out  of  that  house.  Her  eldest  sister  had 
already  married  the  Russian  Grand  Duke  Peter, 
and  another  sister,  also  older,  had  become  the 
wife  of  a  very  great  nobleman  allied  to  the  Russian 
imperial  family, — the  Duke  of  Leuchtenberg, 
who  is  a  descendant,  if  I  am  not  mistaken,  of 
Prince  Eugene  Beauharnais. 

The  present  king,  as  every  one  knows,  was 
born  at  Naples  and  his  cradle  is  still  preserved 
at  Capodimonte.The  royal  villa  of  Capodimonte 
has  been  rarely  inhabited  by  the  royal  family, 
and  its  vast  apartments  furnish  the  very  type  of 
that  indescribable  royal  chilliness  and  vacancy 
of  which  Monza  was  the  complete  antithesis. 
Still  its  situation  above  the  city  of  Naples  is  su- 
perb, and  its  park  is  extensive  and  traversed  by 
carefully  laid-out  avenues  where  one  may  drive 
1 20 


ROYAL  HOMES 

for  a  long  time  without  going  over  the  same  road 
twice.  Down  in  the  town,  only  a  step  removed 
from  the  congested  region  of  the  Toledo,  is  the 
other  Neapolitan  palace,  called  the  Reggia, where 
the  present  king  had  his  official  residence  during 
his  term  of  military  service  as  colonel  of  the  First 
Regiment  of  Infantry  in  1891-92.  All  visitors  to 
Naples  know  this  huge  pile,  with  its  long,  severe 
front,  with  its  red-garbed  beadle  at  the  entrance, 
with  its  fatiguing  suite  of  state  apartments,  and 
with  its  general  unhomelikeness  of  asped:.  The 
sumptuous  staircase,  leading  up  from  the  garden 
entrance  to  the  principal  floor,  is  its  one  really 
fine  feature,  as  it  climbs  and  turns,  and  doubles 
on  itself,  with  its  solid,  well-designed  masses  of 
stately  marble.  Adjoining  this  palace,  at  one  end, 
is  the  famous  Theatre  of  San  Carlo;  and  the  story 
is  told  that  many  years  ago,  one  of  the  Neapoli- 
tan kings  having  expressed  a  wish  that  he  might 
be  able  to  get  to  his  box  in  the  theatre  without 
going  out  of  doors,  the  court  archited:  set  a  large 
force  of  men  at  work  and  that  same  day  and 
evening  constru6led  an  approach  through  which 
the  surprised  monarch  walked  diredly  from  his 
dinner  table  to  his  seat  at  the  opera  without 
descending  to  the  street. 

Tapestries  are  said  to  have  been  resorted  to, 
on  this  fabulous  occasion,  to  conceal  the  gashes 
and  gaps  which  had  necessarily  marked  the  ad- 

121 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

vance  of  this  furious  tunnelling.  But  now  the 
approach  from  the  palace  to  the  theatre  can  be 
accomplished  internally,  without  passing  any 
signs  of  temporary  expedients,  and  is  regularly 
used  by  the  princes  on  state  occasions.  Suddenly, 
one  night,  when  we  were  listening  to  the  opera 
at  San  Carlo,  the  orchestra  ceased  from  its  legiti- 
mate business  of  playing  the  composer  Puccini's 
score,  and  struck  into  the  blaring  notes  of  the 
Inno  Reale — the  Royal  Anthem.  The  audience 
rose,  as  it  is  wont  to  do  on  those  summons,  and 
there  presently  appeared  above  us  Vidor  Em- 
manuel and  Elena  of  Montenegro,  the  former 
in  uniform,  the  latter  in  a  white  toilet  with  a 
coronet  of  diamonds  on  her  head.  We  had  seen 
her  that  morning,  also  in  white,  reviewing  troops 
from  a  carriage,  while  her  husband  did  the  same 
from  a  horse.  Her  fortitude  was  brought  into 
view  on  this  earlier  occasion,  by  the  quiet  and  un- 
perturbed manner  in  which  she  endured  the  ruin- 
ing of  her  parade  costume.  The  rain  descended  in 
torrents,  and  after  the  manner  of  royal  person- 
ages on  such  occasions,  she  was  obliged  to  sit  it 
out,  and  allow  the  confedion  of  her  milliner  and 
her  tailor  to  go  to  ruin.  She  was  very  attentive 
to  the  music  in  the  evening.  For  a  few  moments 
after  entering  the  box  she  turned  her  fine  face 
toward  the  audience  and  gave  them  a  kindly  glance 
in  response  to  their  admiring  plaudits.  But  after 

122 


ROYAL  HOMES 

that  she  persistently  held  her  binocle  to  her  eyes 
and  studied  the  movements  of  the  people  on  the 
stage. 

After  their  marriage  these  two  young  people 
went  to  Florence  and  lived  for  a  while,  quietly, 
at  the  Pitti  Palace.  This  fifteenth-century  con- 
struction of  a  private  citizen  is  perhaps  the  best- 
known  royal  residence  south  of  the  Alps,  and  it 
certainly  has,  for  its  permanent  inhabitants,  the 
most  unique  population  of  any  palace  in  Italy. 
It  is  safe  to  say  that  no  tourist  ever  entered  and 
left  the  gates  of  Florence  without  going  at  least 
once  to  the  Pitti,  and  staring  for  a  few  minutes, 
if  no  longer,  at  the  unique  colledion  of  canvases 
disposed  on  the  walls  of  its  sumptuous  rooms. 
The  very  stateliness  of  the  apartments  has  some- 
thing to  do  with  the  efFed:  of  the  pictures,  by 
giving  them  surroundings  which  do  not  jar  upon 
one's  sense  of  fitness.  As  in  all  palaces,  the  rooms 
of  the  gallery  are  conneded  by  a  series  of  doors 
which  are  placed  next  to  the  window  wall,  and 
at  the  end  of  the  suite  there  is  still  another  door, 
in  the  same  line,  which  is  kept  closed.  This  door 
goes  into  the  royal  apartments,  which  are  con- 
tinued as  far  again  beyond.  From  the  middle  of 
the  long  sequence  of  rooms  one  can  take  in  the 
whole  building,  at  a  glance,  from  end  to  end,  and 
from  the  same  point  a  prospedt  is  to  be  had, 
through  open  doors  and  windows,  out  along  the 

123 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

principal  axis  of  the  Boboli  gardens,  which  runs 
at  right  angles  to  the  long  facade  of  the  palace  it- 
self. There  is  something  geometrically  acute  in 
the  plans  which  were  drawn  by  these  old  Italian 
palace-builders.  Everything  is  centred.  Every- 
thing is  balanced.  What  would  they  think  of 
some  of  the  irregular  and  rambling  constructions 
of  which  we  of  Saxon  tastes  are  so  fond — like 
Windsor  Castle,  for  example,  where  everything 
has  come  to  be  where  it  is  by  haphazard  and 
where  nothing  is  in  line? 

The  rooms  of  the  royal  suite,  at  the  Pitti,  are 
shown  to  the  public  when  the  princes  are  not 
there;  but  they  are  not  especially  noteworthy. 
The  pictures  in  them  are  comparatively  few  in 
number  and  of  secondary  importance,  and  there 
are  not  signs  enough  of  adual  occupancy  to  take 
off  the  dreary  and  desolate  air  which  always  hangs 
over  these  semi-used  royal  houses.  The  young 
king  and  queen  live  there  no  more.  Their  official 
residence,  and  their  adual  abiding-place  during 
the  greater  part  of  the  year,  is  the  Quirinal,  origi- 
nally as  desolate — in  its  state  apartments — as 
the  Pitti,  but  which  has  been  converted  into  the 
semblance  of  a  home  as  the  result  of  adual  and 
continual  occupancy. 

It  is  to  this  palace  at  the  Capital  that  the  Sa- 
voy family  is  summoned,  in  its  whole  numerical 
strength,  for  important  occasions  like  the  open- 
124 


Princes  of  the  House  of  Savoy 

From  the  Illustraxione  I  tali  an  a 


^  or  THe 


ROYAL  HOMES 

ing  of  parliament;  and  from  its  rather  common- 
place gateway,  they  depart  for  the  progress  across 
the  town  to  the  parliament-house,  which  is  situ- 
ated beyond  the  Corso.  The  opening  of  parlia- 
ment is  an  important  fundion  and,  in  Italy  as  in 
England,  is  made  the  excuse  for  a  certain  amount 
of  pageantry  and  parade.  Troops  line  the  streets 
and  at  the  palace  toward  which  the  royal  pro- 
cession takes  its  course  all  the  official  hierarchy 
assembles  to  receive  it.  The  king  enters  amid 
hand-clapping  and  other  manifestations  of  loyal 
enthusiasm  and  seats  himself  upon  the  throne  to 
read  his  speech  while  the  nearest  of  his  blood  take 
standing  positions  on  either  side  of  him. 

In  the  group  of  princes  as  shown  in  the  illus- 
tration here  given  one  notices  that  the  men  all 
have  youthful  faces  and  figures  except  the  one 
at  the  extreme  right,  who  looks  somewhat  older 
than  the  others.  This  is  Prince  Thomas,  Duke 
of  Genoa,  the  brother  of  Queen  Margherita.  The 
royal  tree  of  Italy  has  interlaced  branches,  and 
this  particular  prince  does  not  depend  solely  upon 
his  connexion  with  Margherita  for  his  nearness 
to  the  throne.  He  is  a  nephew  of  Vidlor  Em- 
manuel II  (grandfather  of  the  present  king)  and 
is  capable  of  succeeding  to  the  throne  himself  in 
default  of  nearer  heirs.  Prince  Thomas  possesses 
a  certain  interest  for  English  people  because  he 
was  in  part  educated  at  Harrow,  and  lived  while 

125 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

there  in  the  family  of  Matthew  Arnold.  In  Mat- 
thew Arnold's  letters  there  are  interesting  refer- 
ences to  him,  showing  that  he  had  the  amiable 
temperament  for  which  the  house  of  Savoy-Genoa 
is  distinguished,  and  that  he  endeared  himself  to 
every  one — wearing  his  title  without  affedation. 
The  prince  was  two  years  at  Harrow,  from  the 
spring  of  1 8 69  until  the  spring  of  1 87 1 ,  and  while 
he  was  there  he  had  the  crown  of  Spain  offered 
to  him,  which  he  seems  to  have  regarded  as  a 
terrible  bugbear.  The  difficult  diadem  was  sub- 
sequently refused,  for  him,  by  his  family,  but  it 
was  bound  to  settle  down  on  a  Savoy  head  some- 
where, and  finally  hunted  out  Humbert's  brother, 
Amedeo,  who  adually  wore  the  contentious  coro- 
net for  two  years,  before  he  arrived  at  a  convic- 
tion that  the  honor  did  not  compensate  for  the 
worry  of  it. 

It  was  while  Amedeo  was  still  king  of  Spain 
that  his  son  Luigi  was  born,  who  is  the  youngest 
of  the  princes  in  the  group  shown  in  the  pidure, 
standing  in  the  background  at  the  left.  His  com- 
ing into  the  world  in  that  place  seems  to  have 
been  portentous  and  momentous  for  him.  In  that 
old  court  of  Ferdinand  and  Isabella  the  spirit  of 
discovery  and  of  geographical  conquest  was  in 
the  air  and  he  caught  it.  Twice  he  has  yielded  to 
this  noble  ambition  of  conquering  the  unknown 
and  winning  new  worlds.  In  the  first  instance, 
126 


ROYAL  HOMES 

not  so  very  long  ago,  he  appeared  suddenly  in 
America  with  the  announced  purpose  of  scaling 
an  inaccessible  peak  on  the  Pacific  coast.  Another 
competitor,  in  the  race  for  primacy  in  the  con- 
quest of  this  particular  mountain,  had  several 
weeks  the  start  of  him,  but  in  the  final  struggle 
the  prince  was  vidorious.  A  pidluresque  narra- 
tive of  this  adventure  was  afterward  put  into  print 
in  several  languages,  prefaced  by  a  photograph 
of  the  discoverer,  a  face  which  told  at  a  glance 
the  whole  story  of  his  calm  courage  and  daring. 
The  terrible  force  of  Vidor  Emmanuel  the  elder 
has  descended  to  these  grandsons,  but  the  bru- 
tality of  that  fearful  physiognomy  has  been  cor- 
redled  into  something  far  finer  by  the  admixture 
of  other  mother-bloods.  After  this  conquest  of 
Mount  St.  Elias  this  same  prince,  who  is  offi- 
cially known  in  Italy  as  the  Duke  of  the  Abruzzi 
(a  province  on  the  Adriatic),  attempted  a  much 
more  perilous  venture.  He  set  out  in  the  Stella 
Polare  to  break  the  Nansen  record,  and  did  break 
it,  outdistancing  him  in  the  race  for  the  pole,  as  it 
has  been  humorously  said,  "by  twenty  minutes." 
The  detailed  narrative  of  this  expedition  has,  I 
believe,  not  yet  been  put  into  print,  but  the  prince 
recounted  his  experiences  in  a  spoken  address  at 
Rome,  soon  after  his  return,  to  an  audience  which 
gathered  to  hear  him  in  the  old  Jesuit  institution 
called  the  Collegio  Romano — a  precind:  which 

127 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

forty  years  ago  would  have  thought  Itself  safe 
from  any  such  invasion  by  any  such  ledlurer. 

The  proper  residence  of  this  prince  is  at  Turin, 
as  is  also  that  of  his  two  older  brothers  who  stand 
on  either  side  of  the  king  in  the  opening-of- 
parliament  group.  One  of  them,  the  younger, 
bears  the  great  name,  Vidlor  Emmanuel,  but  the 
name  by  which  he  is  invariably  known  is  his 
brevet  title  of  Count  of  Turin.  Not  long  ago  an 
American  illustrated  journal  published  a  cut  of 
"a  titled  athlete,  Count  Turin"  fording  a  stream 
on  horseback.  The  pidure-editor  of  the  journal 
evidently  had  not  the  slightest  idea  who  Count 
Turin  was,  but  the  exploit  which  he  was  in  the 
ad  of  performing  had  been  thought  worthy  of 
submission  to  the  newspaper's  clientage.  It  was 
indeed  a  daring  venture.  The  prince  was  in  the 
middle  of  a  river  which  swept  onward  with  a 
rapid  current.  Absolutely  nothing  was  visible  of 
the  horse  except  his  head,  and  a  small  part  of  his 
neck.  Just  behind  the  head  of  the  struggling  and 
nearly  submerged  animal  was  the  face  of  an  ath- 
letic man,  holding  on  to  the  bridle  with  bare  arms, 
and  with  a  bare  neck,  ruggedly  moulded,  joining 
his  head  to  his  square  shoulders.  The  pidure 
gave  a  view  of  the  prince  which  was  thoroughly 
in  charader.  He  is  a  powerful  athlete,  versed  in 
all  manly  sports,  and  has  the  temperament  of  a 
soldier.  He  was  perhaps  naturally  the  one  to  come 
128 


ROYAL  HOMES 

to  the  front  in  the  famous  duel  which  took  place, 
not  so  long  ago  as  to  be  entirely  forgotten,  in  de- 
fence, as  it  was  said,  of  the  honor  of  the  Italian 
army,  which  had  been  verbally  attacked  by  Prince 
Henry  of  Orleans.  In  this  duel,  which  was  much 
exploited  by  the  newspapers  at  the  time,  the 
Italian  champion  was  the  vidtor;  and  it  need 
hardly  be  said,  in  view  of  the  well-known  tempera- 
ment of  the  Latin  races  and  their  special  views  on 
the  subjed:  of  the  duel,  that  he  was  an  immense 
gainer  in  personal  popularity  as  the  result  of  this 
experience. 

Neither  Prince  Luigi  nor  the  Count  of  Turin 
is  married,  but  their  older  brother,  the  Duke  of 
Aosta,  who  is  at  present  the  nearest  heir  to  the 
throne  and  stands  on  official  occasions  at  the  king's 
right,  married,  in  1895,  ^^^  Princess  Helen  of 
Orleans,  daughter  of  the  late  Count  of  Paris  and 
sister  of  the  Queen  of  Portugal.  The  ceremony  of 
betrothal  took  place  at  the  Chateau  of  Chantilly 
in  March,  1895,  ^"^  ^^^  wedding  itself  in  June 
at  Kingston-upon-Thames  in  the  little  church  of 
St.  Raphael,  not  far  away  from  Orleans  House, 
a  residence  which  had  sheltered  the  princess's 
family  in  exile.  The  Princess  Helen,  who  was 
born  at  Twickenham  and  passed  a  part  of  her  girl- 
hood in  England,  is  nearly  as  familiar  with  the 
English  language  as  with  the  French,  but  did  not 
immediately,  on  forming  this  Italian  marriage, 

129 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

know  much  of  any  Italian.  She  has  the  aristo- 
cratic fibre  of  her  race  quite  as  pronouncedly  as 
any  of  her  ancestors,  perhaps  more  so  than  Louis 
Philippe,  and  certainly  more  so  than  Philippe 
Egalite.  Her  bearing  is  slightly  chilly  in  its  dig- 
nity— rather  aggressively  royal.  Her  principal 
Italian  residence  is  the  so-called  Palazzo  della 
Cisterna  at  Turin,  which  came  to  her  husband 
from  his  mother,  the  Princess  Dal  Pozzo  della 
Cisterna,  who  left  her  whole  personal  fortune, 
valued  at  twenty  million  lire,  to  this  one  son.  The 
red-garbed  functionary  stands  in  the  doorway  of 
this  spacious  residence.  There  are  wide  gardens 
behind.  The  precind  is  worthy  of  royalty,  and  the 
duchess — she  is  officially  known  as  the  Duchessa 
d'Aosta — has  her  own  court  about  her,  quite 
equal  to  that  of  a  German  reigning  duke.  She  has 
two  children,  both  boys,  and  the  family  group  is 
admired  by  the  loyal  Turinese  in  photography 
in  the  shop  windows.  The  father  is  a  man  of 
fine  physique  and  military  bearing,  whose  near- 
ness to  the  throne  makes  him  the  proper  repre- 
sentative of  the  sovereign  on  occasions  of  great 
importance,  when  a  deputy  of  the  very  highest 
rank  is  necessary.  It  was  the  Duke  of  Aosta  who 
rode  with  the  corps  of  foreign  sovereigns,  in  the 
memorable  funeral  cortege  which  passed  across 
London  on  its  way  from  Osborne  to  Windsor 
in  February,  1901. 
130 


ROYAL  HOMES 

After  the  present  king's  accession  to  the  throne, 
it  became  necessary  to  provide  an  appropriate 
residence  for  his  mother.  Queen  Margherita,  and 
it  was  then  that  the  projed  was  planned  and  car- 
ried out  of  buying  for  her  the  sumptuous  mod- 
ern Palazzo  Piombino  which  occupies  a  proud 
position  at  the  curve  of  the  Via  Veneto  in  one 
of  the  most  presentable  of  the  newer  quarters  of 
Rome.  This  palace  was  occupied  for  a  number 
of  years  by  the  American  ambassador,  and  to 
many  Americans  it  is  a  matter  of  regret  that  it 
was  not  purchased  by  the  government  as  the  per- 
manent seat  of  the  embassy — General  Draper 
having  informed  the  home  government  that  the 
property  was  available  for  purchase,  and  at  a 
price  by  no  means  extravagantly  large,  consider- 
ing the  size  and  situation  of  the  house.  During 
the  occupancy  of  the  ambassador,  whose  name 
I  have  just  mentioned,  the  palace  was  refitted 
and  refurnished  in  such  a  way  as  to  make  it  rather 
notable  for  its  magnificence  even  among  Roman 
palaces,  and  the  task  of  preparing  it  subsequently 
for  Queen  Margherita's  occupancy  was  much 
lightened  in  consequence.  The  palace  is  shallow, 
but  it  has  a  spacious  state  suite  on  the  principal 
front,  running  the  whole  length  of  the  house — 
in  possibility,  if  not  adually  thrown  together 
— and  rendering  it  a  convenient  establishment 
in  which  to  entertain  on  a  large  scale. 

131 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

Queen  Margherita  was  already  established  in 
this  house  at  the  time  of  the  birth  of  the  latest 
addition  to  the  Savoy  family  in  the  person  of 
the  little  Princess  Jolanda,  who  was  born  at  the 
Quirinal,  June  i,  1901.  On  the  following  y^j/<^ 
of  San  Giovanni  the  loyal  Romans,  after  crowd- 
ing in  a  great  body  around  the  Quirinal  gates  to 
show  their  satisfaction  at  the  important  event 
which  had  so  recently  transpired  within  its  walls, 
marched  in  a  body  to  the  palace  of  Queen  Mar- 
gherita to  make  another  demonstration  of  loyal 
enthusiasm  at  her  doors.  The  movement  was 
spontaneous  and  showed  the  continuing  affedion 
which  is  felt  at  Rome,  and  indeed  everywhere 
throughout  Italy,  for  this  admirable  woman  who 
has  known  so  well,  through  twenty  years  and  more, 
how  to  fulfil  the  duties  of  wife,  mother,  and  queen. 
The  cries  of  the  crowd  brought  her  to  the  bal- 
cony which  opens  from  the  great  room  just  over 
the  entrance,  and  gave  the  multitude  the  satis- 
faction of  looking  at  a  face  very  familiar  to  them, 
which  at  that  moment  could  smile  despite  the 
heavy  draperies  of  black  which  covered  her  fig- 
ure. A  touch  of  the  human  nature  which  makes 
the  whole  world  kin,  was  injeCled  into  this  little 
moment  of  solemn  festivity,  by  the  sudden  ap- 
pearance of  the  queen's  pet  cat  on  the  balustrade. 
This  enormous  creature,  fed  on  royal  cream  and 
coated  with  royal  fur,  had  followed  its  mistress 
132 


ROYAL  HOMES 

out  through  the  glass  door  on  to  the  balcony, 
and  had  wished  to  satisfy  its  curiosity  as  to  what 
would  be  visible  from  the  railing  The  queen,  far 
from  resenting  the  creature's  familiar  intrusion, 
stroked  the  soft  fur  and  smiled,  and  the  crowd 
below  broke  out  in  fresh  plaudits  of  amused  ad- 
miration which  continued  until  the  animal  and 
its  mistress  withdrew. 


133 


THE  THEATRES 


CHAPTER  VI 
THE   THEATRES 

GOING  to  the  theatre  in  Italy  is  not  a 
pastime  in  which  foreigners  are  very  apt 
to  indulge  unless  they  are  residents  there, 
or  have  made  considerable  progress  with  the  lan- 
guage. And  if  they  have — or  think  they  have — 
made  considerable  progress  with  the  language,  the 
sitting  through  a  single  play  is  apt  to  have  a  dis- 
couraging and  depressing  effed  in  its  revelation 
of  what  there  is  yet  to  be  learned.  Italian  adors 
seem — it  may  be  only  seeming — to  speak  with 
a'rapidity  which  outdoes  that  of  the  adors  of  any 
other  nation.  They  race  along  at  an  alarming  pace. 
Their  words  gush  forth  in  a  torrent  which  starts 
rapidly  and  gathers  velocity  as  it  advances.  And 
in  their  furious  and  impetuous  utterance  of  for- 
eign syllables  it  is  only  the  very  pradised  ear  which 
can  infallibly  catch  every  word  and  be  sure  that 
not  a  shading  of  the  meaning  is  lost. 

The  person  who  suffers  from  a  sense  of  imper- 
fed  apprehension  in  a  foreign  theatre  occasion- 
ally derives  some  comfort  from  finding  that  even 
in  a  playhouse  where  English  is  spoken  it  is  not 
always  possible  to  understand  every  word.  The 
fad  that  an  ador's  part  is  learned  by  rote  and  that 

^Z7 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

the  words  are  not  seleded  as  he  proceeds,  naturally 
leads  him  to  speak  at  a  brisker  pace  than  in  ordi- 
nary conversation.  Once  in  a  while,  even  when 
we  are  listening  to  our  own  language,  we  are 
likely  to  lose  a  word  or  two,  and  there  has  to  be 
some  guessing  to  fill  up  the  gap.  But  it  is  rarely 
that  an  English  auditor  in  an  English  theatre  is 
so  completely  left  when  the  laugh  comes — if  the 
play  is  one  which  permits  one  the  refreshment  of 
laughing — as  he  sometimes  is  when  he  has  to  fol- 
low the  sparkling  and  brilliant  dialogue  of  a  com- 
pany of  Italian  comedians.  It  is  humiliating  to 
sit  silent  when  all  the  rest  of  the  house  is  enjoy- 
ing an  outburst  of  honest  laughter — so  humili- 
ating that  the  silent  foreigner  usually  practises 
a  little  frank  deception  to  hide  his  disgrace  and 
joins  in  the  laugh  himself.  The  pradice  of  fol- 
lowing one  of  these  racing  Italian  dialogues  for 
four  or  five  ads  is  unquestionably  a  good  one  for 
training  the  ear,  but  when  one  is  a  beginner  at 
it,  it  entails  an  appreciable  amount  of  mental  fa- 
tigue. The  play  in  such  cases  becomes  a  discipline 
— good  for  one's  faculties  of  apprehension,  but 
decidedly  exhausting  in  its  immediate  effed:. 

The  Italian  theatres — especially  the  more 
modest  ones — frequently  have  something  novel 
to  offer  to  the  foreign  eye.  I  am  speaking  at  this 
moment  not  of  the  ading  but  of  the  building  it- 
self. One  finds,  here  and  there,  something  which 

138 


THE  THEATRES 

seems  like  a  dired  survival  of  the  old  Latin  thea- 
tre in  the  form  of  a  roofless  auditorium,  differing 
but  little  from  the  theatres  which  the  tourist  sees 
at  Syracuse  and  Pompeii.  There  is  one  of  these 
theatres  still  standing  at  Leghorn,  where  accord- 
ing to  tradition  Tommaso  Salvini  made  his  first 
appearance.  The  walls  are  complete.  The  place  is 
entirely  enclosed,  so  far  as  the  vertical  masonry 
is  concerned.  But  there  is  no  roof.  There  are  some 
window  openings  in  the  naked  wall,  but  from  the 
street  outside  one  looks  diredlly  through  them 
to  the  sky.  Inside  the  seats  are  arranged  more 
after  the  modern  than  the  Latin  system.  They 
are  disposed  in  balconies.  But  in  its  other,  and 
more  essential,  particulars  the  place  is  still  Latin 
and  Roman. 

I  have  in  mind  another  theatre  at  Leghorn, 
where  the  same  principle  of  construction — the 
principle  of  leaving  the  roof  open — is  introduced 
in  a  modified  form.  It  is  a  theatre  in  which  we 
went  to  see  a  play  given  by  a  very  clever  Italian 
company  with  an  artist  of  considerable  distinction 
at  its  head — Tina  Di  Lorenzo — a  name  still  un- 
known outside  of  Italy  although  familiar  enough 
to  Italian  playgoers.  The  company  was  what  was 
called,  and  was  entitled  to  be  called,  first  class. 
And  yet  the  theatre  itself  was  primitive  to  a  de- 
gree. When  we  entered  we  found  a  huge  pile  of 
cushions  just  inside  the  door  which  could  be 

139 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

rented  for  the  evening.  The  seats  themselves  were 
cushionless.  The  majority  of  those  who  entered 
paid  a  few  soldi  to  the  man  at  the  door,  took  a 
cushion  from  the  pile,  and  carried  it  along  with 
them  to  their  seat.  The  orchestra  in  this  theatre 
was  placed  in  one  of  the  balconies  at  the  back. 
There  may  have  been  no  place  for  it  down  in  front, 
as  music  is  not  an  ordinary  feature  in  theatres 
devoted  to  the  spoken  drama ;  but  whatever  may 
have  been  the  motive  for  assigning  it  this  pecul- 
iar position  the  band  was  placed  there,  behind  us, 
and  discoursed  its  inter-a6l  music  to  our  backs. 
The  drop-curtain,  which  filled  the  proscenium 
arch  and  which  was  lowered  between  the  ads,  was 
divided  into  compartments  of  painted  scrollwork, 
and  in  each  of  these  compartments  was  an  ad- 
vertisement of  some  local  tradesman.  Above  our 
heads  what  should  have  been  the  dome  of  the  au- 
ditorium was  replaced  by  an  immense  skylight; 
and  this  skylight  during  the  evening  which  I  have 
in  mind — an  August  evening — was  all  open  to 
the  stars.  The  stars  themselves  were —  I  regret  to 
say  for  the  poetry  of  the  eflFed — not  visible.  The 
bright  lights  of  the  theatre  inside  put  them  into 
complete  eclipse,  and  all  that  we  saw  as  we  looked 
up  was  a  soft  void  of  velvety  blackness  with  not  so 
much  as  a  twinkle  or  a  spark  to  give  it  luminosity. 
The  play  itself,  which  was  presented  on  that 
evening,  was  done  with  the  utmost  vivacity.  The 
140 


THE  THEATRES 

whole  company  bubbled  and  sparkled  and  effer- 
vesced from  beginning  to  end.  It  was  a  perpetual 
uncorking  of  ever  fresh  instalments  of  dramatic 
champagne — or  rather  of  the  real  article  and  not 
the  dramatic  article.  The  spirits  of  the  company 
were  inexhaustible.  They  knew  their  parts,  fortu- 
nately, and  they  rendered  them  with  an  amount 
of  spontaneity  and  exuberance  which  was  a  reve- 
lation to  the  foreigner — even  to  the  foreigner 
who  knows  Italy  fairly  well.  At  midnight  the 
comedy  was  doubtless  still  going  on  in  the  same 
brilliant  way.  I  say  doubtless,  for  we  did  not  stay 
to  the  final  descent  of  the  grotesque  curtain.  The 
foreigner  could  see  enough  by  eleven  o'clock  to 
reasonably  satisfy  himself,  and,  let  me  add,  could 
go  home  reasonably  fatigued  by  the  effort  to  un- 
derstand the  racing  utterance  of  the  speakers.  To 
follow  them  with  perfed:  satisfadlion  and  perfed 
success,  something  like  an  intellectual  automobile 
would  have  been  necessary.  The  pedestrian  mind 
could  not  keep  pace  with  them. 

The  spoken  drama  at  Rome  has  one  of  its 
principal  homes  in  the  little  old  Teatro  Valle, 
an  ancient  playhouse  which  seems  shrunken  and 
wizened  in  its  old  age.  The  small  auditorium  is 
surrounded  by  several  tiers  of  microscopic  boxes, 
so  low  and  narrow  that  the  people  who  sit  in 
them  look  like  veritable  colossi — or  like  human 
beings  in  a  doll-house.  Everything  about  the 

141 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

place  is  cramped,  contraded,  and  primitive.  The 
decorations,  which  could  never  have  been  of 
much  account  artistically,  are  faded  and  dilapi- 
dated. The  corridors  and  approaches  are  bare 
and  severe  to  a  degree.  At  the  box-office,  as  one 
applies  for  places,  one  finds  the  pradice  of  fill- 
ing out  the  box-ticket  in  ink,  still  in  vogue.  The 
ticket-seller  is  provided  with  a  blank-book  full 
of  coupons,  and  when  one's  proper  place  is  se- 
lec5ted  or  assigned  the  morsel  of  thin  paper  which 
constitutes  one's  title  to  the  box  is  filled  out  like 
a  bank-check  and  placed  in  the  hands  of  the  pro- 
spedive  occupant.  The  passport  to  an  orchestra- 
stall  is  often,  and  I  presume  regularly,  filled  out 
in  the  same  way — so  economical  is  the  manage- 
ment of  printer's  ink,  or  so  devoted  to  old  tradi- 
tions. And  yet  in  this  playhouse,  as  in  the  still 
ruder  one  at  Leghorn,  one  may  find  a  quality  of 
dramatic  artwhich  rarely  honors  our  best  theatres. 
The  Valle  has  seen,  in  its  day,  all  the  great  celeb- 
rities of  the  Italian  stage.  Adelaide  Ristori  made 
some  of  her  early  appearances  there,  and  after 
her  came,  in  brilliant  sequence,  many  other  adors 
whose  names  are  familiar  in  Italy,  and  among 
them  those  two  or  three  stars  of  the  first  magni- 
tude who  have  made  the  merits  of  the  Italian 
school  of  a6ling  known  abroad. 

Italian  theatre-goers  have  been  provided  with 
many  more  attradive  playhouses  than  the  Valle 
142 


THE  THEATRES 

Theatre  at  Rome.  The  Teatro  Manzoni  at  Milan 
is  one  of  these,  a  modern  structure  built  into  the 
mass  of  buildings  constru6led  around  the  great 
arcade  called  the  Galleria  Vittorio  Emanuele.  It 
is  roomy  and  conveniently  appointed  and  fur- 
nishes a  good  illustration  of  the  progressive  spirit 
of  the  Milanese.  When  I  think  of  this  particular 
home  of  modern  comedy,  the  brilliant  ading  of 
Ermete  Novelli  presents  itself  to  my  mind  as 
inseparably  linked  with  that  interior.  We  know 
very  little,  as  yet,  of  this  clever  and  versatile  adtor 
in  English-speaking  countries.  His  is  perhaps 
not  the  sort  of  art  which  is  adapted  to  a  foreign, 
or,  let  me  say  frankly,  to  a  non-comprehending 
audience.  The  pantomime  and  mimicry  may  count 
for  a  good  deal,  it  is  true,  in  the  clever  interpre- 
tation of  his  comedies,  but  the  particular  turn  of 
expression,  the  witty  sallies  which  his  author  fur- 
nishes him,  are  also  a  great  deal.  It  is  in  his  plays 
in  particular  that  the  foreigner  often  finds  him- 
self left  behind  when  the  laugh  comes;  and  with 
an  exclusively  English  audience  half  of  the  force 
and  significance  of  his  ading  would  inevitably  be 
lost. 

At  Turin,  to  turn  to  one  of  the  lesser  capitals, 
there  are  a  number  of  theatres,  but  among  them 
the  one  which  rises  most  distindly  before  my 
mental  vision,  is  the  Teatro  Carignano,  a  play- 
house which  may  possibly  be  quite  as  old  as  the 

143 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

Valle,  but  which  is  infinitely  superior  to  it  in  in- 
terior beauty.  The  Carignano  of  course  follows 
the  old  pattern,  with  its  box-fronts  rising  tier 
above  tier  to  the  very  dome, — the  only  pattern 
of  theatre  which  was  known  in  Europe  a  century 
ago.  In  this  particular  it  resembles  the  Valle,  but 
where  the  Roman  interior  is  dreary  and  bare  this 
is  covered  with  elaborate  decoration.  The  whole 
surface  of  the  box-fronts  seems  to  be  overlaid 
with  gold-leaf  subdued  to  a  dull  lustre,  and  in  this 
series  of  gilt  frames  the  occupants  of  the  boxes 
are  set  off  in  pidluresque  relief  against  the  deep 
crimson  hangings.  Up  on  the  ceiling  some  clever 
hand  has  painted  a  flight  of  graceful  figures  in 
soft  colors,  forming  a  suitable  and  harmonious 
piece  of  decoration.  The  drop-curtain  is  not  oc- 
cupied with  advertisements  but  is  ornamented — 
or  was  as  I  remember  it — with  a  Venetian  pidlure, 
showing  a  high  terrace  in  the  foreground  and  a 
stretch  of  lagoon  under  a  sunset  sky  behind. 

It  was  in  this  theatre  that  we  first  saw  Eleo- 
nora  Duse — saw  her  in  one  of  those  pitiful  plays 
of  modern  social  life  of  which  Camille  is  the  pro- 
totype and  which  has  had,  alas,  so  many,  many 
after-types.  As  we  went  to  the  Carignano  that 
evening  we  found  ourselves  wondering  what  par- 
ticular shape  the  unfortunate  happenings  of  the 
play  would  assume.  Would  the  husband  or  the 
wife  be  the  criminal?  And  how  would  the  wife 
144 


THE  THEATRES 

die  in  the  last  ad?  For  that  she  would  come  to 
a  tragic  end  in  one  way  or  another,  there  was  little 
room  to  doubt.  Our  preconceptions  of  what  the 
stuff  of  the  drama  would  be  were,  as  it  proved, 
wholly  justified.  It  happened  to  be  the  husband 
who  was  unfaithful, — and  the  wife's  suffering, 
which  commenced  with  the  first  rising  of  the 
curtain  at  nine  o'clock,  was  continued  until  mid- 
night, and  ended  finally  in  suicide.  A  very  large 
and  very  representative  audience,  containing  ele- 
ments from  every  sedion  of  Turinese  society,  and 
delegations  of  reporters  from  other  cities,  went 
to  listen  to  the  unhappy  tale  and  showed  their 
appreciation  of  it  by  frequent  applause  while  the 
scenes  were  in  progress  and  by  clamorous  recalls 
after  each  descent  of  the  curtain.  One  of  the  nota- 
ble features  about  the  tragedienne's  acknowledg- 
ment of  these  noisy  plaudits  was  that  she  never 
for  a  moment  issued  from  her  role.  If  the  applause 
continued  persistent  after  the  descent  of  the  cur- 
tain, as  it  generally  did,  a  door  would  open  from 
the  subterranean  recesses  of  the  Venetian  terrace 
and  the  slight  and  frail-looking  figure  would  come 
into  view.  A  few  sad  steps  would  be  taken  with 
a  melancholy  smile  before  the  footlights  and  the 
sorrowful  figure  would  disappear  through  the 
other  door.  There  were  none  of  the  grimaces  by 
which  the  "artist  "in  general  seeks  to  compensate 
the  audience  for  the  honor  of  its  approbation.  The 

H5 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

unity  of  the  role  was  never  once  broken.  The  note 
of  tragedy  was  consistently  maintained. 

It  was  Flavio  Ando  who  sustained  the  second 
role  on  this  particular  evening, — an  ungrateful 
part  which,  used  as  he  is  to  rendering  such  char- 
aderSj  he  must  have  disliked  to  assume.  Possibly 
this  excused  or  explained  his  imperfect  memo- 
rizing of  his  lines,  which  at  certain  points  rather 
marred  the  efFe6t  of  his  ading.  The  role  of  the 
prompter  has  not  become  a  wholly  superfluous 
one  in  Italian  theatres,  and  on  this  particular  even- 
ing the  invisible  man  in  the  hooded  box  had  to 
recite  many  passages  of  the  second  adores  part. 
It  was,  to  say  the  least,  trying  to  the  nerves  of 
the  listeners  to  hear  the  words  which  Ando  was 
to  utter,  hissed  out  in  a  more  than  audible  whisper, 
before  they  were  taken  up  by  the  a6lor  himself; 
and  at  certain  points  where  this  halting  echo  was 
supposed  to  represent  an  impetuous  and  spon- 
taneous outburst  of  passion  the  effedt  bordered 
on  the  ridiculous. 

As  to  the  adling  of  the  heroine,  the  distinctive 
quality  in  it  which  impressed  us  at  that  time,  and 
which  has  re-impressed  us  on  every  occasion  when 
we  have  heard  her  since,  was  its  poignant  natu- 
ralism. She  seemed  to  be  not  so  much  putting 
on  agony  as  adually  suffering.  The  absence  of 
conventional  gestures  was  one  of  the  incidents 
of  her  art  which  contributed  very  much  to  this 
146 


THE  THEATRES 

general  efFed:.  Intonation  was  much.  The  perfed 
naturalness  of  the  tone  and  the  total  suppression 
of  the  declamatory  and  rhetorical  counted  for  a 
great  deal.  But  the  avoidance  of  "gestures"  in 
the  technical  sense,  certainly  had  its  share.  Eleo- 
nora  Duse  as  we  all  know  does  not  keep  her  hands 
still.  She  does  not  walk  about  with  them  glued 
to  her  side.  But  what  she  does  with  them  is  what 
a  natural  woman  does.  She  smooths  out  the  folds 
of  her  dress.  She  arranges  her  hair.  She  does  a 
thousand  and  one  things  which  are  feminine,  which 
are  human,  which  are  natural;  and  she  does  not 
wave  them  and  pose  them  in  the  flourishes  and 
the  curves  which  have  so  long  been  favored  by 
the  artificial  persons  of  the  stage. 

All  this  is  refreshing  by  way  of  contrast.  I  do 
not  say  that  the  basis  of  our  approval  and  enjoy- 
ment of  it  necessarily  goes  any  deeper.  We  may 
have,  in  another  decade,  a  readlion,  a  violent  re- 
adion,  toward  the  stately  and  the  classic  type  of 
dramatic  art  of  which  the  playgoers  of  two  gen- 
erations ago  were  so  passionately  and  so  genuinely 
fond;  but  meanwhile  the  other  method  comes 
upon  us  with  its  own  freshness  and  its  own  pos- 
sibility of  arousing  genuine  interest.  The  Italian 
public  has  learned  to  like  Eleonora  Duse*s  way 
of  doing  things,  but  it  did  not  always  like  it.  Her 
first  eflTorts  were  by  no  means  accepted  as  exhib- 
iting unmistakable  signs  of  genius.  The  time 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

was  when  she  was  regarded  as  good  for  nothing 
but  the  roles  of  the  bungling  supernumerary.  To 
adopt  the  phrase  of  one  of  her  ItaHan  critics,  she 
was  supposed  to  be  up  to  nothing  except  to  an- 
nounce that  the  "carriage  was  served"  or  that 
the  "dinner  was  at  the  door."  Her  way  into  favor 
was  won  laboriously.  At  the  beginning  it  was 
with  difficulty  that  she  obtained  roles  which  gave 
her  an  opportunity  even  to  exhibit  her  possibili- 
ties. And  at  the  last  it  required  the  impetus  of  a 
foreign  success  to  carry  her  over  the  final  barrier 
of  hostile  criticism  at  home  and  place  her  firmly 
in  the  position  of  accepted  mastery  of  her  art 
which  she  has  since  incontestably  held.  While 
the  Italian  public  and  Italian  managers  still  hesi- 
tated, the  reports  came  back  of  how  she  was  being 
lionized  at  Vienna,  of  how  her  horses  were  taken 
from  her  carriage  at  Moscow,  and  of  how  her  ad- 
mirers in  other  foreign  cities  had  presented  her 
with  wreaths  and  jewels  and  laudatory  poems. 
And  with  this  climax  of  foolish  hero-worship 
abroad  her  primacy  in  her  own  country  was  at 
length  definitely  won,  and  the  opponents  of  her 
methods  crushed  and  discomfited. 

The  stage  setting  in  the  case  of  the  particular 
play  of  which  I  have  just  been  speaking,  and  the 
stage  setting  in  general  in  Italian  theatres,  is  apt 
to  strike  the  foreigner  as  meagre  and  inadequate. 
The  truth  is  that  the  management  has  not  the 
148 


THE  THEATRES 

means  to  expend  upon  this  side  of  the  perform- 
ance which  it  has  in  English  and  American  thea- 
tres. The  theatre  itself,  owing  to  the  waste  of 
space  resulting  from  the  box-system,  will  not  be- 
gin to  seat  as  many  people  as  our  theatres  seat, 
and  the  prices  of  places  are  generally  lower.  A 
single  play  cannot  possibly  have  the  run  which 
it  has  in  our  large  cities  because  the  cities  them- 
selves are  smaller,  and  the  clientage  of  the  stridly 
first-class  drama  is  sooner  exhausted.  The  conse- 
quence is  that  the  financial  resources  of  a  mana- 
ger are  apt  to  be  severely  taxed  simply  to  pay 
his  company  and  his  theatre-rent,  and  little  or 
nothing  remains  to  be  put  into  scenery  or  other 
accessories.  Even  the  inter-ad  orchestra,  as  I  have 
already  said,  is  usually  a  missing  quantity.  But 
this,  in  Latin  theatres,  one  is  bound  to  admit,  is 
of  little  consequence.  The  audience  has  plenty  of 
other  resources  for  filling  the  tiresome  waits.  The 
restaurant  in  the  foyer  is  always  ready  to  wel- 
come any  refugees  from  the  auditorium.  And  for 
those  who  do  not  care  to  visit  the  cafe,  there  is 
the  agreeable  alternative  of  visiting  acquaintances 
in  the  boxes  or  in  the  stalls,  and  comparing  notes 
— with  Latin  volubihty — on  the  merits  and  de- 
merits of  the  play. 

In  the  matter  of  scenic  magnificence  a  notable 
exception  to  the  general  rule  has  been  recently  fur- 
nished by  the  produdion  of  Francesca  da  Rimini 

149 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

at  Rome  during  the  winter  of  1901-92.  This 
play  was  brought  out  at  the  Teatro  Costanzi, 
which  is  a  much  larger  theatre  than  the  Valle  and 
provided  with  a  stage  of  the  proper  size  for  the 
arrangement  of  elaborate  spedacles.  It  is  said 
that  the  expense  of  the  sumptuous  mise-en-scene 
was  paid  by  Eleonora  Duse  herself,  and  if  the 
report  is  true  it  gives  an  adequate  explanation  of 
the  striking  innovation.  Her  acquaintance  with 
what  can  be  done  and  what  is  done  abroad  would 
have  furnished  her  with  a  precedent  which  few 
Italian  managers  would  have  had  and  would  also 
constitute,  in  itself,  an  incentive  toward  produ- 
cing something  equally  elaborate  on  the  Italian 
stage.  Francesca  da  Rimini  lived  in  a  piduresque 
epoch,  and  the  accessories  of  the  period  were  care- 
fully studied  from  authentic  originals  and  repro- 
duced with  more  than  ordinary  regard  for  historic 
accuracy.  The  armor  and  the  furniture  and  the 
costumes  made  a  distind  impression  upon  the 
Roman  public  and  the  expenditure  involved  was 
in  some  quarters  criticised  as  lavish  and  unneces- 
sary. For  those,  however,  who  enjoy  stage  pict- 
ures, and  who  like  to  see  a  picturesque  past  tan- 
gibly and  visibly  realized  before  their  eyes,  the 
production  was  a  source  of  great  artistic  gratifica- 
tion on  its  scenic  side  alone. 

Eleonora  Duse,  as  has  already  been  said,  oc- 
cupies the  same  position  of  unique  prominence 
150 


[■ 

^^1 

HHj 

^^^^^^^K^^i 

^HPK^j^^Bifl 

^^^H^^ 

im^flBj^Mfl^^^H 

^^^H^p% 

■j^^^^H 

H| 

^^^^1^ 

^1 

^^^^^^^^ 

l^/^^^^^^^^^^H 

^^M 

i^H 

Eleonora  Duse  as  Francesca  da  Rimini 


THE  THEATRES 

in  Italy  which  she  does  abroad,  and  her  inter- 
pretation of  her  recent  role  of  Francesca,  despite 
the  regrettable  subordination  of  her  own  judg- 
ment to  that  of  the  author  of  the  play,  has  not 
lessened  the  esteem  in  which  she  personally  is 
held  there.  If  one  looks  around  for  other  can- 
didates for  leadership  among  the  contemporary 
Italian  players,  there  are  few  names  to  be  cited 
which  are  not  wholly  strange  to  the  foreign  ear, 
and  it  is  hardly  worth  while  here  to  go  through 
the  list  of  them.  Two  of  them  have  already  been 
named,  Novelli  and  Di  Lorenzo,  without  prob- 
ably awakening  in  the  mind  of  the  reader  a  single 
association  or  recolledion.  I  prefer  in  what  else 
I  have  to  say  about  the  people  of  the  stage  to 
abandon  the  adlual  celebrities  of  the  footlights 
and  note  down  a  few  impressions  of  two  adors 
who  retired  from  public  view  some  time  ago  but 
whose  names  still  remain  familiar — Salvini  and 
Ristori.  Their  longevity  furnishes  a  striking  refu- 
tation of  the  theory  that  the  life  of  the  stage 
is  physically  depleting  and  exhausting.  Both  of 
them  have  encountered  all  the  hardships  of  the 
ad:or*s  existence  through  a  long  and  laborious 
career,  and  yet  they  seem  to  have  accumulated 
rather  than  lost  physical  vigor  as  the  result  of  it. 
When  I  think  of  Salvini  the  man  I  see  him  in 
the  environment  of  the  attradive  home  which  he 
made  for  himself  at  Florence  a  number  of  years 

151 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

ago  when  he  felt  the  need  of  settling  himself 
somewhere  in  permanency.  It  is  situated  in  a 
pleasant  part  of  the  city,  out  beyond  the  Piazza 
deir  Annunziata,  where  there  is  sufficient  open 
space  to  make  gardens  a  possibility.  The  Salvini 
house  is  of  the  villa,  not  the  palazzo,  type — as 
one  would  exped:  in  this  semi-suburban  region. 
It  is  a  comparatively  low  strudure,  of  only  two 
stories,  I  believe,  and  th^ padrone  di  casa  occupies 
the  whole  of  it  himself  instead  of  subletting  a 
portion  of  his  interior  to  other  persons  according 
to  the  custom  which  prevails  in  the  case  of  the 
larger  Italian  palaces. 

Through  the  pleasant  entrance-arch  one  gets 
a  glimpse  of  a  fountain  and  an  open  space  be- 
yond, and  it  is  upon  this  inner  area  that  the  win- 
dows of  Salvini*s  personal  den  or  study  open.  In 
all  the  appointments  of  the  room  one  sees  evi- 
dences of  refined  tastes,  and  of  the  ability  to 
gratify  them  liberally.  The  book-cases  are  of  good 
design  and  are  filled  with  neatly  bound  books. 
The  writing-table  is  an  interesting  example  of 
wood-carving,  and  the  writing-tools  which  rest 
upon  it  are  seleded  with  reference  to  their  beauty 
as  well  as  their  utility.  The  chairs  and  sofas  sug- 
gest English  comfort  rather  than  Italian  magnifi- 
cence. A  touch  of  Italianism  is  introduced  into 
the  room,  however,  by  the  marble  busts  which 
are  seen  at  one  side,  and  by  the  trophy  of  armor 
152 


THE  THEATRES 

which  ornaments  the  wall-panel  above  the  sofa. 
Poniards,  daggers,  and  hand-arms  of  a  variety 
of  beautiful  designs  are  introduced  in  this  com- 
position, and  with  their  picturesque  shapes  and 
damascened  surfaces  contribute  not  a  little  to  the 
decoration  of  the  interior. 

Salvini  himself  is  agentleman  of  dignified  pres- 
ence upon  whom  the  title  of  Commendatore  (given 
him  by  the  king)  rests  naturally  and  fittingly.  The 
"  commendatore  "  is,  however,  not  put  to  the  front 
in  social  intercourse.  There  is  no  hauteur  in  his 
manner.  His  bearing  is  dignified,  but  it  is  also 
what  the  Italians  call  simpatico.  In  temperament 
he  is  emphatically  a  gentleman  in  the  literal  sense 
of  the  term.  Gentleness  seems  the  dominant  note 
in  his  personality.  One  naturally  thinks  of  Salvini 
as  a  tragedian,  doing  deeds  of  violence,  it  may  be, 
— showing  the  force  and  the  fury  of  a  passion- 
ate nature.  But  in  the  study  nothing  of  this  is 
visible.  The  claws,  if  there  are  any,  are  covered 
with  velvet.  The  force  and  the  fury  are  all  re- 
served for  the  stage. 

It  is  interesting  to  note  at  short  range  the  per- 
fed  command  which  he  has  of  his  remarkable 
voice.  Nature  has  given  him  a  vocal  tone  of  great 
sonority  and  power,  capable  of  filling  the  largest 
auditorium.  But  at  a  distance  of  three  steps  in 
the  relatively  narrow  limits  of  a  modern  library, 
it  seemed  equally  well  adapted  to  the  work  which 

153 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

it  had  to  perform.  It  was  as  soft  and  gentle  as  the 
voice  of  a  nurse  at  a  bedside.  There  was  a  quality 
of  velvety  richness  in  his  deep-chested  syllables. 
They  came  out  gently  and  melodiously,  with  cer- 
tain intonations  which  were  almost  caressing  in 
their  sympathetic  shading. 

I  do  not  undertake  to  repeat  any  of  the  con- 
versation in  which  the  great  man  very  frankly  and 
freely  allows  himself  to  engage  because  it  relates 
usually  to  himself,  to  his  family,  and  to  the  lesser 
incidents  of  his  Florentine  life.  He  remembers, 
even  after  years,  the  shock  occasioned  to  him  by 
the  death  of  his  oldest  son,  Alessandro,  who  had 
taken  up  the  profession  of  the  stage  and  followed 
it  with  considerable  success  both  in  Italy  and  in 
America.  The  loss  was  a  double  grief  to  the  fa- 
ther because  it  meant  the  extindion  not  only  of 
a  cherished  life  but  also  of  a  career  which  he  was 
beginning  to  follow  with  the  keenest  sympathy 
and  interest.  In  partial  compensation  for  this  loss 
Salvini  had  the  satisfadion  of  seeing  other  sons 
grow  up  around  him,  children  of  a  second  mar- 
riage, and  he  spoke  in  almost  patriarchal  terms 
of  his  delight  in  his  second  household  and  in  the 
enlarged  family  life  which  they  led  together  when 
they  could  escape  from  Florence  and  get  out  into 
the  freedom  of  his  estate  in  the  country. 

The  surroundings  in  which  Adelaide  Ristori 
at  present  lives  are  not  less  attradive  than  those 
154 


THE  THEATRES 

of  Sal  vini,  although  of  a  somewhat  different  type. 
Ristori  married  in  early  life  the  Marquis  Giuliano 
Capranica  del  Grillo  and  her  principal  home — 
that  is,  her  winter  home — is  in  the  palace  of  the 
Capranicas  at  Rome.  This  palazzo  is  situated  in 
a  part  of  the  city  which  is  comparatively  little 
known  to  the  foreigner,  being  in  one  of  the  short 
streets  near  the  Valle  theatre  and  quite  away 
from  all  the  large  thoroughfares.  The  building 
may  be  an  old  one,  but  it  bears  internal  evidence 
of  having  been  altered  by  some  recent  genera- 
tion of  its  occupants.  Instead  of  being  entered 
by  an  archway  leading  to  a  courtyard,  the  street 
door  communicates  diredly  with  an  interior  hall 
of  rather  English  type,  bordered  with  carved  cabi- 
nets and  pieces  of  sculpture;  and  at  the  end  of 
this  hall  there  is  a  broad  flight  of  interior  stairs 
rising  to  the  principal  floor.  On  this  floor  there 
is  a  large  drawing-room  of  generous  Roman  pro- 
portions, with  an  array  of  comfortable  modern 
furnishings ;  and  it  is  in  this  salon  that  the  mar- 
chesa  receives  her  guests. 

Seeing  Adelaide  Ristori  walk  into  this  room 
gives  one  much  the  same  sensation  as  if  Sarah 
Siddons  should  step  down  from  her  frame  over 
the  mantel  in  the  drawing-room  at  Grosvenor 
House  and  stretch  out  her  hand  to  salute  the 
visitor.  Her  voice  does  not  dispel  the  illusion. 
It  is  measured  and  dignified.  After  listening  to 

155 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

the  voluble  and  frivolous  chatter  of  the  every- 
day world  it  strikes  one's  ear  like  the  utterance 
of  a  superior  caste,  which  has  unfortunately  be- 
come almost  extind. 

Ristori's  autobiography  has  been  published 
and  is  accessible  both  in  Italian  and  French  to 
the  reading  public.  It  is  an  interesting  tale,  told 
with  much  literary  taste  as  well  as  with  charm- 
ing modesty.  In  referring  to  this  printed  volume, 
she  frankly  confessed  that  the  part  of  it  which 
had  given  her  the  most  trouble  in  the  composi- 
tion was  the  part  describing  her  relations  with 
Mile.  Rachel.  What  passed  between  these  two 
divinities  of  the  stage  when  the  Italian  adress 
first  went  to  Paris  half  a  century  ago  is  now  a 
forgotten  piece  of  dramatic  history,  but  in  its 
day  the  incident  made  considerable  stir.  Rachel 
was  reported  to  have  been  hostile  to  Ristori.  Ac- 
cording to  the  on  dits  which  were  industriously 
circulated,  she  came  in  disguise  to  the  theatre 
where  Ristori  was  playing  and  after  listening  to 
her  awhile,  with  growing  agitation,  tore  up  her 
libretto  and  left  her  box  saying  "  Cette  femme  me 
fait  mal — ^je  n'en  peux  plus."  There  were  other 
stories  of  RacheFs  refusal  to  be  approached  by 
Ristori  and  of  her  returning  to  the  stage  while 
the  latter  was  still  playing  at  Paris  as  if  to  reclaim 
the  dubious  allegiance  of  her  proper  subjeds  and 
crush  her  rival.  The  attitude  which  Ristori  takes 
156 


THE  THEATRES 

in  her  book  toward  all  these  stories  is  a  digni- 
fied one.  She  dismisses  them  as  being  nine-tenths 
rumor  and  idle  gossip,  and  is  at  some  pains  to 
praise  RacheFs  ading  and  give  her  her  proper 
place  as  the  foremost  interpreter  of  the  French 
classic  drama. 

The  volume  of  memoirs  is  so  brief  that  the 
reader  of  Ristori's  interesting  narrative  comes  to 
the  end  with  a  sense  of  disappointment  at  not 
having  more  to  read.  She  has  allowed  herself 
only  one  hundred  and  forty-two  pages  while  an- 
other Italian  ador  of  her  own  time  (not  Salvini) 
has  found  it  impossible  to  do  justice  to  himself 
in  less  than  three  volumes.  We  called  her  atten- 
tion to  the  unnecessary  brevity  of  her  book  and 
were  assured  that  it  had  wearied  her  out  as  it  was. 
"The  task  was  a  difficult  one,"  she  said,  "and  it 
became  an  odious  one.  The  incessant  speaking 
of  one's  self  is  most  fatiguing.  The  sense  of  inner 
rebellion  steadily  increases  until  it  brings  one  to 
a  full  stop.  I  could  not  have  possibly  written 
more  at  that  time.  And  I  have  never  felt  any 
disposition  to  resume  the  work  since."  As  she 
spoke  these  words  in  her  calm,  dignified,  and  de- 
liberate manner,  we  felt  that  we  had  a  worthy 
descendant  of  the  old  Romans  before  us.  When 
would  the  modern  adress  ever  be  sated  with  the 
first  person?  Immature  critics  may  scale  all  the 
heights  of  undeserved  flattery — may  become 

157 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

fairly  incoherent  in  their  ravings — and  yet  the 
insatiable  vanity  of  the  dramatic  egoist  will  still 
crave  for  more. 

There  is  one  incident,  among  the  personal  suc- 
cesses modestly  recorded  by  Ristori  in  her  book, 
which  has  since  been  repeated  and  made  familiar 
because  of  its  special  and  unusual  characfter.  It 
is  the  story  of  her  intercession  for  the  life  of  a 
Spanish  soldier  at  Madrid — a  soldier  condemned 
to  death  for  some  petty  ad  of  insubordination, 
whose  pardon  she  solicited  and  obtained  at  the 
queen's  hands.  The  incident  occurred  in  the  court 
theatre,  when  Queen  Isabella  was  attending  the 
play,  and  the  petition  for  pardon  was  presented 
by  Ristori  in  person  in  the  royal  box.  Apropos 
of  this  incident  she  related  to  us  another,  which 
I  believe  is  still  inedit^  and  of  which  I  insert  an 
abbreviated  version  here.  The  incident  occurred 
in  the  capital  of  Chili  when  she  was  playing  there, 
perhaps  a  good  many  years  ago.  She  achieved  re- 
markable success  with  this  impressionable  Latin 
public.  She  was  admired  as  an  adress  and  also  as 
a  woman.  In  certain  quarters  she  seems  to  have 
been  regarded  as  something  more  than  human 
— to  have  been  looked  upon,  in  short,  as  a  sort 
of  divinity,  capable  of  doing  anything,  even  of 
working  miracles  in  case  of  need. 

"The  Chilians  made  the  most  extraordinary 
demands  upon  me,"  she  said.  "One  of  them  ap- 

158 


THE  THEATRES 

pealed  to  me  from  a  prison  cell.  He  was  under 
sentence  of  death  and  was  going  to  be  executed  in 
a  few  days.  He  wished  me  to  obtain  his  pardon." 

"What  had  he  done?" 

"I  asked  the  same  question.  He  had  man- 
aged to  get  a  letter  to  me.  I  could  not  imagine 
how  he  had  even  discovered  my  presence  in  the 
town.  In  his  letter  he  said  that  he  was  condemned 
for  a  hasty  ad:,  and  that  if  I  could  obtain  his  par- 
don he  would  prove  his  repentance  by  his  fault- 
less condud:." 

"Did  you  find  out  the  nature  of  his  offence?" 

"I  did.  He  had  killed  his  wife.  The  motive 
was  jealousy." 

Here  was  the  heroine  of  the  classic  drama, 
who  had  perhaps  several  times  suffered  stran- 
gulation at  the  hands  of  an  infuriated  Othello, 
brought  face  to  face  with  a  living  tragedy.  What 
would  she  do? 

She  proceeded  to  satisfy  our  curiosity. 

"I  went  to  see  him  in  his  cell.  He  told  me  his 
story.  The  man  had  an  impetuous  nature.  He 
had  the  hot  blood  of  an  African.  When  his  pas- 
sions were  aroused  he  became  like  an  infuriated 
animal.  He  was  no  longer  responsible  for  him- 
self or  conscious  of  what  he  was  doing.  I  could 
see  this  from  the  way  in  which  he  spoke  when 
he  was  telling  me  his  story." 

The  parallel  with  Othello  seemed  perfect. 

159 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

"I  could  not  help  pitying  him,"  continued 
the  marchesa.  "He  adted  under  the  influence  of 
sudden  passion.  He  was  thoroughly  repentant. 
No  one  regretted  more  bitterly  what  had  oc- 
curred than  he  did  himself.  He  had  a  child — a 
little  girl — to  whom  he  was  devotedly  attached." 

"What  course  did  you  pursue?" 

"I  informed  myself  as  to  the  proper  authority 
to  appeal  to,"  said  the  speaker,  in  her  stately, 
solemn  voice.  "It  was  the  president  of  the  coun- 
cil. I  went  to  him  and  interceded  for  the  man's 
life." 

She  gave  us  no  details  to  help  us  picture  the 
scene.  What  would  she  have  done?  Would  she 
have  adopted  unconsciously  the  attitudes  and 
the  gestures  of  the  stage?  We  found  ourselves 
making  certain  conjectures,  unconsciously — in- 
voluntarily. 

She  had  pronounced  the  abrupt  denouement 
before  we  could  finish  the  mental  pidure. 

"He  listened  to  me  respedfully  and  said  he 
would  investigate  the  case.  I  found  out  after- 
ward that  the  sentence  of  death  had  been  com- 
muted to  imprisonment  for  a  term  of  years." 

Certainly  her  intercession  was  effedive  and  re- 
markably so.  The  man  with  the  impetuous  nature 
is  probably  still  living  to  thank  his  deliverer,  and 
to  be  grateful  for  the  inspiration  which  led  him 
to  appeal  to  a  woman  of  rare  talents  and  high 
1 60 


THE  THEATRES 

charader  who  happened  to  be,  just  at  that  mo- 
ment, the  most  conspicuous  and  admired  person 
in  the  Chilian  capital. 

Ristori  completed  her  eightieth  year  on  the 
29th  of  January,  1902,  and  various  things  oc- 
curred at  that  time  to  show  the  high  estimation 
in  which  she  is  still  held  at  Rome,  and  indeed 
throughout  Italy.  The  king  called  upon  her  and 
offered  his  congratulations  in  person.  The  gov- 
ernment ordered  a  commemorative  gold  medal  to 
be  struck,  bearing  her  portrait  and  an  appropriate 
inscription.  Numerous  theatres  all  over  Italy  ar- 
ranged festival  performances  in  her  honor,  and 
letters  and  telegrams  poured  in  upon  her  from 
all  sides.  On  the  evening  of  the  birthday  a  com- 
memorative performance  was  given  at  the  Teatro 
Valle  at  which  so  much  of  the  l^utta  Roma  was 
present  as  could  find  places  and  in  which  a  num- 
ber of  dramatic  artists  of  prominence  participated. 
TommasoSalvini  rendered  a  dramatic  scene  from 
one  of  Gazzoletti's  plays  and  Ermete  Novelli  re- 
cited a  monologue.  Ristori  occupied  the  middle 
box  of  the  second  tier,  which  had  been  for  a  long 
time  the  property  of  the  Capranica  family,  and  it 
was  in  this  box,  during  the  course  of  the  evening, 
that  she  was  visited  by  the  member  of  the  cabinet 
charged  with  the  duty  of  presenting  her  the  gov- 
ernment medal,  and  that  the  presentation  itself 
took  place.  I  should  add  that  Salvini  not  only  ap- 

161 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

peared  as  an  ador,  but  also  made  a  short  discourse 
in  which  he  reviewed  Ristori's  career  from  the  in- 
teresting point  of  view  of  one  who  had  been  in 
touch  with  it  from  the  first  and  had — at  times — 
been  a  part  of  it. 

Ristori's  domestic  life  has  been  particularly 
happy.  She  has  a  daughter  and  a  son  and  three 
grandchildren  who  all  live  at  Rome  and  whom 
she  constantly  has  about  her.  Her  son,  the 
Marquis  Giorgio  Capranica  del  Grillo,  holds  an 
important  position  in  the  official  household  of 
Queen  Margherita.  The  latter  has  always  felt  a 
particular  regard  for  Ristori  and  has  allowed  her 
to  approach  her  very  closely.  It  is  needless  to 
say  that  Ristori's  social  position  at  Rome  is  of  the 
highest.  The  friendship  of  the  court  would  assure 
it,  if  it  were  not  already  abundantly  assured  by 
her  independent  claims  upon  social  resped:  and 
esteem.  At  her  little  jubilee  just  referred  to  she 
appeared  to  be  in  remarkably  good  health,  and 
her  friends  look  confidently  forward  to  repeating 
their  congratulations  on  many  more  birthdays. 


162 


THE  STUDIOS 


CHAPTER  VII 
THE   STUDIOS 

THE  attradions  which  Rome  offers  to 
art-lovers  are  not  all  exhausted  when 
one  has  completed  the  inspedlion  of  the 
great  galleries  and  the  great  collections  in  the 
private  palaces.  The  studios  still  remain  to  be 
explored.  And  in  them  one  has  not  only  the 
pleasure  of  finding  an  array  of  inanimate  objeds 
of  more  or  less  interest,  but  a  further  objed  of 
interest  in  the  artist  himself.  The  genius  loci  is, 
in  fad:,  apt  to  be  the  great  attradion  of  the  place. 
He  is  usually  a  man  with  a  sympathetic  person- 
ality. He  has  led  an  interesting  life.  And  he  is 
generally  ready,  through  the  medium  of  enter- 
taining talk,  to  take  the  visitor — for  a  little  way 
at  least — into  this  special  and  peculiar  world 
which  he  inhabits  and  give  him  some  inkling  of 
the  fascination  which  it  possesses  for  those  who 
pass  their  lives  there. 

Some  of  the  Roman  studios  have  been  occu- 
pied by  successive  generations  of  artists  and  have 
become  in  a  certain  sense  historic.  I  remember 
one  of  them  in  particular  which  had  sheltered 
several  men  who  had  played  leading  roles  in 
the  art  history  of  Rome  during  the  century  just 

165 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

ended,  and  which — when  I  first  came  to  know 
it — was  occupied  by  a  veteran  artist  whom  I  will 
call  De  Angelis.  I  am  tempted  to  describe  this 
studio  because  it  offered  such  a  fine  example  of 
the  spacious  and  sumptuous  work-rooms  which 
the  Roman  painters  who  have  inherited  the  proud 
old  traditions  were  fond  of  creating  for  themselves. 
It  was  situated  in  the  heart  of  the  old  Bohemian, 
quarter  between  the  Piazza  di  Spagna  and  the 
Piazza  del  Popolo — a  region  which  might  well 
be  called  the  Latin  Quarter  of  Rome,  if  all  Roman 
quarters  were  not  Latin.  In  order  to  reach  it  one 
turned  aside  from  a  narrow  street  into  a  courtyard 
on  which  many  studios  opened,  and  then  pro- 
ceeded to  mount  to  this  particular  apartment  by 
a  flight  of  steps  leading  up  from  the  level  of  the 
court  to  an  ivy-covered  porch  jutting  out  from 
the  wall.  De  Angelis  once  had  himself  photo- 
graphed in  this  porch,  with  the  ivy-embowered 
opening  serving  as  a  frame ;  and  it  was  his  quaint 
conceit  to  place  himself  so  that  the  little  lettered 
tablet,  which  marked  the  quarters  as  his  own, 
came  diredly  beneath  his  face  and  served  as  a 
label  to  the  portrait. 

Just  inside  of  the  outer  door  there  was  a  short 
passage,  tapestried  with  sketches  and  studies, 
which  led  to  the  first  painting-room,  reserved  for 
portrait-sitters;  and  through  this  smaller  room 
one  could  reach  the  larger  studio  where  there 
1 66 


orris     >-       . 


One  of  the  Studios 


%}l   Mm 

■Jim 

THE  STUDIOS 

was  plenty  of  elbow-room  for  painting  big  can- 
vases, such  as  would  be  required  for  a  mural- 
painting  or  an  altar-piece.  De  Angelis  once  gave 
me  a  photograph  of  this  room  and  I  reproduce 
it  here  for  the  sake  of  conveying  some  idea  of 
what  the  interior  was  like.  At  the  time  the  photo- 
graph was  taken  there  was  an  equestrian  portrait 
of  King  Humbert  standing  on  an  easel  at  one 
side,  which  represented  him  as  just  riding  out 
of  the  Quirinal  and  acknowledging  the  plaudits 
of  the  crowd  which  had  assembled  to  greet  him. 
There  was  also  a  portrait  of  the  artist  himself,  in 
a  frame  with  an  oval  opening,  leaning  up  against 
the  king's  pidure,  which  he  had  painted  for  the 
colled:ion  of  portraits  of  artists  at  the  Uffizi  in 
Florence  and  which  now  hangs  in  that  gallery. 
This  colledlion,  at  the  Uffizi,  is  one  which  the 
tourist  rarely  sees,  but  which  is  well  worthy  of 
inspection.  It  contains  likenesses  of  all  the  great 
painters,  ancient  and  modern,  and  has  been  re- 
cently rearranged  in  some  rooms  specially  set 
apart  for  it  on  the  floor  just  beneath  the  great 
gallery. 

In  the  centre  of  the  studio,  suspended  from  the 
lofty  ceiling,  was  a  chandelier  of  Venetian  glass 
in  which  the  candles  tipped  out  from  the  per- 
pendicular with  the  perverseness  which  is  char- 
aderistic  of  Venetian  chandeliers  everywhere; 
and  on  the  floor,  propped  up  against  a  carved 

167 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

chair,  was  another  souvenir  of  Venice  in  the  form 
of  a  study  for  the  head  of  a  Doge — a  handsome 
old  man  with  a  white  beard — which  De  Angelis 
had  introduced  in  one  of  his  historical  paintings. 
Around  the  room  were  a  host  of  minor  objeds 
which  show  very  dimly  in  the  photograph,  but 
which  it  was  a  pleasure  to  examine  in  detail. 
There  were  carved  chests  and  inlaid  cabinets. 
There  were  examples  of  artistic  pottery  of  every 
epoch,  from  the  ancient  Etruscan  to  the  modern 
majolicas  of  Florence.  And  the  great  space  of  the 
upper  walls  was  covered  with  old  tapestries  and 
examples  of  embroidery  on  silk  and  velvet  which 
were  choice  in  texture  and  design,  and  a  keen 
source  of  gratification  to  the  aesthetic  sense. 

I  had  an  opportunity  to  become  quite  familiar 
with  this  fine  old  studio  because  I  went  there 
daily  for  a  week  or  more  to  watch  the  painting 
of  a  portrait  which  De  Angelis  had  undertaken 
at  my  request.  The  veteran  artist  was  full  of 
conversation  and  talked  while  he  worked — al- 
ways ready  to  furnish  subjeds  himself  or  to  en- 
large delightfully  and  endlessly  on  the  themes 
which  we  gave  him.  The  sittings  took  place  in 
the  little  painting-room  and  not  in  the  large 
apartment  which  I  have  just  described,  and  this 
smaller  studio  was  sele6ted  because  we  were  still 
in  March  and  it  was  thought  that  the  fireplace 
might  have  to  be  utilized  at  times  to  keep  the 
i68 


THE  STUDIOS 

sitter  comfortable.  The  great  room  had  no  chim- 
ney and  would  indeed  have  been  quite  unwarm- 
able.  It  was  too  large  and  too  high  to  receive  any 
impression  whatever  from  the  feeble  heating  de- 
vices which  constitute  the  only  resource  of  the 
Romans  for  combating  the  penetrating  chill  of 
their  winter  climate. 

De  Angelis  had  an  extraordinary  power  of  fix- 
ing and  retaining  a  mental  image  of  what  he  had 
once  seen.  He  painted  not  only  when  his  sitter 
was  before  him  but  when  she  was  absent  from 
the  studio.  The  portrait,  indeed,  seemed  to  grow 
more  rapidly  when  he  was  alone  than  when  he 
had  his  model  before  him.  It  went  forward  with 
great  strides  from  day  to  day  with  a  Jack-and- 
the-Beanstalk  growth. 

I  should  have  asked  him  how  he  did  it,  if  the 
question  had  not  been  infantile.  As  it  was,  I  com- 
mented on  his  remarkable  memory. 

"  It  is  sometimes  convenient,"  he  replied.  "All 
sitters  are  not  as  patient  as  this  one." 

The  sitter  emerged  from  her  silent  role  enough 
to  express  acknowledgments. 

"Kings,  for  example,"  he  went  on,  "do  not 
make  good  Subjeds.  We  could  hardly  exped  it 
of  them." 

We  were  sitting  at  that  moment  facing  a  por- 
trait of  Humbert  which  was  different  from  the 
one  which  stood  on  the  easel  in  the  larger  room 

169 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

and  more  striking  as  a  likeness.  It  had  been 
painted  by  De  Angelis  for  his  own  pleasure  and 
not  as  a  definite  commission  —  and  as  sometimes 
happens  in  such  cases  it  was  better  done  than 
perfundory  canvases  are  likely  to  be.  The  gray 
hair  stood  ered  above  the  king's  forehead.  The 
eyes  blazed  with  the  fire  which  has  shone  from 
the  eyes  of  no  other  man  of  our  generation  and 
which  made  his  expression  absolutely  unique. 
He  had  the  large  mustache  of  the  House  of 
Savoy,  and  the  warm  coloring  which  was  essen- 
tial to  complete  the  soldierly  character  of  the 
physiognomy. 

The  painter  stirred  some  colors  together  on  his 
palette  and  continued  meditatively :  "  When  one 
paints  a  king,  one  may  be  obliged  to  condense  a 
good  deal  of  seeing  into  a  very  few  seconds." 

"You  were  thinking  of  this  portrait?" 

"Yes." 

"You  speak  as  if  His  Majesty  had  been  un- 
tradable." 

"He  was,  rather." 

"Not  disagreeable?" 

"No,  not  precisely." 

"Where  was  it  painted?" 

"At  one  of  the  Ministries  —  the  Ministry  of 
Finance,  I  believe." 

"He  was  doing  something  else  at  the  time?" 

"He  was  looking  over  tiresome  papers — some 
170 


THE  STUDIOS 

new  statement,  perhaps,  of  the  lavish  expendi- 
tures of  an  extravagant  parliament." 

"  Did  he  pay  any  attention  to  you  ? " 

"When  I  asked  him  to." 

"You  had  to  appeal  to  him  diredly?" 

"I  asked  him  to  look  up  occasionally,  but 
that  was  all  I  got."  De  Angelis  took  his  eyes  off 
from  an  imaginary  paper,  gave  one  flash  in  my 
diredion,  and  looked  down  again. 

"You  had  to  take  him  down  stenographically, 
so  to  speak?" 

"Yes,  you  might  say  so." 

"Was  he  in  the  habit  of  treating  portrait- 
painters  in  that  way?" 

"C^/  lo  sa — who  can  tell?  Not  one  in  twenty 
of  his  portraits  was  painted  from  personal  sit- 
tings. I  appreciated  it  as  a  privilege  to  be  able 
to  paint  diredly  from  his  face  under  any  circum- 
stances. He  was  not  unkind  in  his  manner.  I  had 
painted  him  before  when  he  was  less  pressed  for 
time  and  when  he  had  given  me  every  facility 
which  I  could  ask.  He  had  conferred  a  decora- 
tion upon  me,  not  merely  motu  proprio  in  the 
official  sense,  but  as  a  personal  expression  of  his 
favor.  He  always  knew  me  whenever  he  saw  me 
— which  is  saying  a  good  deal." 

"He  is  said  to  have  been  marvellous  for  rec- 
ognizing people." 

"Perhaps." 

171 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

"You  are  sceptical." 

"  I  have  reason  to  be.  I  have  been  behind  the 
scenes." 

"How  behind  the  scenes?" 
■     "Royalty  does  not  always   recognize  with- 
out assistance.  It  recognizes  with  the  aid  of  a 
prompter." 

"A  what?" 

"A  souffleuVy  as  they  call  it  on  the  stage — 
some  one  who  stands  conveniently  near  and  sup- 
plies names,  and  so  forth,  as  required." 

De  Angelis  squeezed  a  little  more  paint  on  to 
his  palette  from  one  of  the  tubes  in  his  paint- 
box and  then  went  on :  "  If  an  out-of-the-way 
province  is  to  be  visited,  the  prompter  is  sent  on 
in  advance  to  post  himself  about  all  the  notables. 
Then  he  keeps  close  to  the  king  and  disgorges 
all  his  information,  in  instalments,  at  the  proper 
moments.  The  result  of  it  is  that  the  king  calls 
everybody  by  name  and  compliments  each  man 
on  the  thing  that  he  wants  to  be  complimented 
on." 

"How  convenient!" 

"In  the  case  of  the  opening  of  an  art  exposi- 
tion," continued  the  painter,  "  the  matter  is  sim- 
pler. Any  old  war-horse  of  the  chisel  or  palette 
will  fill  the  role  without  preparation." 

"  Like  Monteverde,"  I  said,  naming  a  veteran 
Roman  sculptor. 
172 


THE  STUDIOS 

"Yes,  like  Monteverde,"  acquiesced  the 
painter. 

"Or  De  Angelis." 

"Even  De  Angelis.  Only — '*  and  the  owner 
of  the  name  paused  a  moment — "once  I  failed 
to  prompt  quite  quickly  enough  and  nearly 
pun(5lured  the  bubble  of  my  reputation  for  do- 
ing the  role  well.** 

"The  occasion  was — ?" 

"A  national  pidure  exposition  held  here,  a 
dozen  or  more  years  back.  I  was  walking  perhaps 
nearest  the  king — there  were  several  artists 
in  the  suite — when  we  suddenly  turned  a  cor- 
ner and  came  upon  a  ^  new  school  *  canvas.  It  was 
an  atrocity.  It  crossed  my  mind  that  I  ought 
to  say  something,  but  I  hesitated  a  moment  too 
long.  Possibly  I  was  stunned.** 

"What  happened?** 

"The  king  saw  it  and  blurted  out  some  un- 
repeatable words  before  there  was  time  to  put 
him  on  his  guard.** 

"  Why  should  he  have  been  put  on  his  guard  ? " 

"The  young  man  who  painted  the  pidure 
happened  to  be  walking  diredly  behind  us.  As  a 
matter  of  fad:  I  knew  he  was  there,  but  I  was  not 
quick  enough  with  the  warning  which  I  ought  to 
have  given.  He  was  a  nice  fellow,  too — one  of 
the  nicest  fellows  in  the  world  and  all  right  every 
way  if  he  would  only  leave  paint  alone.  It  was 

173 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

too  bad.  I  felt  dreadfully  about  it,  but — " 

I  did  not  urge  him  to  finish  the  sentence. 
There  was  an  expression  of  malicious  joy  visible 
upon  his  face  which  showed  that  even  after  the 
lapse  of  a  decade  or  more,  he  could  still  relish 
the  sweet  savor  of  that  sudden  and  righteous 
chastisement. 

"I  noticed  a  portrait  of  the  queen  in  the  other 
room." 

"Yes,"  said  De  Angelis.  "I  painted  Her  Maj- 
esty. But  the  pidure  in  the  other  room  is  a  rep- 
lica, not  the  original." 

"What  became  of  the  original?" 

"It  went  to  the  Senate.  It  was  hung  in  the 
Palace  where  the  Senate  holds  its  sittings.  It  was 
an  official  commission." 

"The  queen  was  probably  a  better  model  than 
the  king." 

"  She  jWas  very  gracious  and  amiable,"  returned 
the  painter.  "She  always  is." 

"It  is  safe  to  say  you  did  not  go  to  one  of  the 
Ministries  to  get  a  sitting." 

"  No,"  said  De  Angelis.  "  She  did  not  frequent 
the  Ministries.  She  was  mercifully  spared." 

"It  is  said  that  she  was  not  averse  to  visiting 
studios." 

"She  occasionally  visited  studios,"  observed 
the  artist,  permitting  himself  to  be  led  on.  "  She 
came  here.  Her  mother  came  also.  They  wrote 
174 


THE  STUDIOS 

their  names  in  my  visitors'  book.  When  a  person 
has  no  last  name,  it  is  less  of  an  effort  to  write 
an  autograph." 

He  paused  a  moment  in  his  work,  turned  in 
his  low  chair,  and  took  a  large  album  from  be- 
neath a  pile  of  sketch-books  on  a  table  beside 
him. 

"Here  are  the  signatures,"  he  said. 

He  had  opened  the  volume  to  the  place  where 
Margherita  stood  written  in  a  long,  much-in- 
clined hand,  across  the  page.  The  autograph  was 
of  royal  proportions  and  had  taken  quite  a  good 
deal  of  ink.  But  it  was  also  very  feminine.  It 
was  almost  a  girlish  hand.  It  had  been  put  there 
many  years  ago  and  had  photographed  her  tem- 
perament of  the  moment  in  indelible  lines. 

The  conversation  came  for  a  moment  to  a 
pause,  but  it  was  speedily  resumed.  Other  topics 
presented  themselves.  The  autograph  album  con- 
tained many  other  signatures  of  persons  of  dis- 
tin6lion,  whom  the  painter  had  known,  and  each 
one  of  these  names  furnished  a  theme  on  which 
he  was  prepared  to  talk  at  some  length,  and  al- 
ways with  interest.  The  sketch-books  were  full 
of  drawings  done  by  his  clever  hand,  most  of 
them  portraits.  The  study  of  the  human  face  was 
the  study  which  had  interested  him  most.  Por- 
traiture had  come  naturally  to  be  his  specialty, 
and  although  he  did  not  refuse  other  commis- 

175 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

sions  when  they  came  to  him,  it  was  his  portraits 
which  did  him  the  most  credit  and  by  which  he 
was  the  best  known.  I  found  an  inexhaustible 
resource  for  entertainment,  while  I  was  in  the 
studio,  in  examining  these  clever  drawings  which 
filled  his  books,  and  in  listening  to  his  narratives 
of  the  circumstances  under  which  they  had  been 
made. 

The  days  of  the  sittings  went  rapidly  by,  in 
this  way,  with  talk  which  I  might  transfer  to 
these  pages,  but  which  would  take  up  too  much 
room  if  I  should  yield  to  the  temptation  to  do 
so.  I  may  as  well  break  the  long  chain  of  it  here 
for  the  sake  of  introducing  the  reader  to  another 
phase  of  artist  life  at  Rome  which  is  perhaps 
more  intimate  than  this  glimpse  of  the  inside  of 
the  studio.  De  Angelis  had  another  interior,  quite 
separate  from  the  atelier^  to  which  he  also  in- 
vited us  and  where  we  felt  it  perhaps  a  greater 
privilege  to  be  admitted.  This  other  interior  was 
his  home — a  home  which  he  had  created  for 
himself  in  a  charming  apartment  in  the  Piazza 
del  Popolo,  where  the  windows  on  one  side 
opened  diredtly  upon  the  ascent  to  the  Pincio 
and  on  the  other  into  a  court  which  was  sur- 
rounded with  arcades  and  embellished  with  a 
fountain.  The  palace  belonged  to  the  Torlonias 
although  it  was  not  occupied  by  them,  and  it 
was  built  in  the  solid,  sober,  stately  Roman 
176 


THE  STUDIOS 

fashion  which  prevailed  when  the  Piazza  del 
Popolo  was  created  and  the  houses  which  border 
it  were  ereded. 

On  a  certain  day  in  Holy  Week,  just  before 
Easter,  we  were  bidden  to  luncheon  in  this  ar- 
tistic home,  and  were  shown,  one  after  the  other, 
the  various  rooms — each  differing  in  charader 
— of  which  it  was  made  up.  The  host  came  for- 
ward to  receive  us  in  the  vestibule,  which  was 
decorated  in  a  style  of  its  own  with  fragments  of 
sculptured  marble  and  old  terra-cottas,  and  we 
were  taken  from  there  into  the  blue  reception- 
room  where  the  painter's  sister  waited  to  welcome 
the  visitors  after  her  cordial  fashion.  The  Signo- 
rina  Virginia  was  a  lady  of  a  stridly  Roman  type, 
gracious,  accomplished,  and  sympathetic.  We  had 
already  met  her  at  the  studio,  for  she  was  an  artist 
herself  and  had  a  painting-room  side  by  side  with 
her  brother's.  In  the  domestic  interior  she  per- 
haps found,  however,  a  more  appropriate  setting. 
Certainly  the  qualities  of  the  woman  came  more 
assertively  forward  and  those  of  the  artist  were, 
for  the  moment,  pushed  rather  more  into  the 
background. 

From  the  reception-room  we  were  conduded 
into  a  third  room  which  was  larger  and  evidently 
the  principal  salon  of  the  house.  The  walls  were 
covered  from  floor  to  ceiling  with  pidures,  studies, 
and  sketches,  large  and  small.  Every  great  painter 

177 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

who  had  visited  Rome  in  the  last  thirty  years 
seemed  to  have  left  with  De  Angelis  some  me- 
morial of  himself  There  were  sketches  by  For- 
tuny,  by  Alma  Tadema,  by  Meissonier,  and  by 
a  score  of  other  men  of  less  note. 

On  the  tables  were  wine-glasses  from  the  old 
Venetian  fadories,  with  their  preposterous  stems. 
There  were  small  bronzes  with  the  stamp  of  un- 
known antiquity  upon  them.  And  every  inch  of 
space  not  filled  with  more  precious  objeds  had 
a  photograph  crowded  into  it.  We  were  still  ex- 
amining these  interesting  objedls  and  listening  to 
the  painter's  comments  and  explanations  when  a 
servant  appeared  at  the  door  with  an  announce- 
ment which  compelled  a  temporary  suspension 
of  his  monologue  and  an  adjournment  to  the 
dining-room,  where  the  luncheon  stood  ready  to 
be  served. 

The  numerous  courses  of  the  menu  brought 
forward  some  cosmopolitan  dishes  and  some  which 
were  purely  Italian  and  Roman.  The  signorina 
was  the  paragon  of  gracious  solicitude.  Delicate 
invalids  who  needed  to  be  tempted  and  urged, 
in  order  to  take  the  nourishment  which  their  de- 
bilitated systems  required,  could  not  have  been 
watched  over  by  a  more  tenderly  anxious  guardian. 
The  atmosphere  was  charged  with  hospitality  to 
the  point  of  saturation.  It  would  have  held  no 
more. 

,78 


THE  STUDIOS 

For  the  epilogue  of  the  luncheon  we  were  taken 
into  another  room.  It  had  the  air  of  being  the 
master's  study,  and  was  indeed  such.  The  coffee 
apparatus  was  placed  on  a  low  table,  and  the  ser- 
vant was  dismissed.  The  signorina  prepared  to 
serve  us  herself,  and  we  settled  back  into  com- 
fortable seats  to  watch  the  operation. 

"No  sugar,"  said  Madame  in  sudden  alarm, 
catching  sight  of  a  crystalline  tablet  suspended 
above  what  was  evidently  intended  to  be  her  cup. 

The  warning  was  just  in  time.  The  hostess 
passed  the  unsweetened  mixture  to  the  guest 
whose  tastes  she  could  not  understand,  and  pro- 
ceeded to  fill  the  remaining  cups. 

She  was  seated  on  a  low  divan  which  bent  around 
the  corner  of  the  room  and  came  out  to  a  window. 
Through  the  window  there  was  a  glimpse  of  a 
balcony  with  some  plants  in  pots  on  the  parapet. 
The  sun  was  far  enough  west  to  throw  most  of 
the  foliage  into  shadow,  but  here  and  there  a  spray 
of  leaves  bent  out  far  enough  to  get  into  the  bath 
of  sunshine. 

De  Angells  stirred  what  his  sister  had  given 
him  into  a  consistent  syrup  and  expressed  some 
interest  in  our  plans  for  Easter.  We  were  going 
to  St.  Peter's  of  course. 

Madame  admitted  the  possession  of  a  ticket  to 
the  latticed  box  in  the  Choir.  Would  it  be  really 
worth  while,  she  queried,  to  make  the  necessary 

179 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

early  start  and  endure  the  long  antecedent  wait 
for  the  sake  of  what  might  follow  later?  The  lat- 
ticed box  had  become  a  familiar  prison  during 
the  last  few  days.  She  had  been  there  repeatedly 
for  various  functions.  Through  its  gratings  one 
looked  out  upon  the  other  worshippers,  she  said, 
with  the  sense  of  being  a  Caucasian  slave  in  an 
Oriental  mosque. 

De  Angelis  thought  that  it  might  be  relatively 
worth  while. 

He  was  tempted  into  a  mood  of  retrosped. 
The  modern  Easter  was  a  shrunken  thing,  he  said, 
so  far  as  pageantry  was  concerned,  compared  to 
the  Easter  which  he  had  known  in  his  youth. 
One  might  go  and  look  at  it  with  possible  inter- 
est if  one  had  never  seen  it  as  it  used  to  be.  The 
new  Easter  compared  to  the  old  was  something 
like  a  humming-bird  compared  to  a  peacock. 

What  could  Easter  be,  anyway,  without  the 
Pope?  —  he  went  on  with  growing  fervor.  Had 
he  not  seen  Pio  Nono  standing  on  the  balcony 
of  St.  Peter's,  with  the  jewelled  triple  crown  upon 
his  head,  lifting  his  hand  and  pronouncing  his 
benedidlion?  Had  he  not  stood  in  that  crowd 
himself  and  heard  those  solemn  words  that  made 
the  whole  multitude  kneel?  And  had  he  not  had 
a  thrill,  even  in  his  own  rational  and  not  too  de- 
vout nature,  in  listening  to  them? 

The  signorina  sighed. 
1 80 


THE  STUDIOS 

"Tell  us  about  it,"  said  Madame. 

"What  are  words,"  returned  the  old  Roman. 
"You  should  have  seen  it." 

"It  was  too  long  ago,"  said  the  first  speaker. 
"I  should  have  had  to  be  carried  in  arms." 

"It  was  a  sight  for  children,"  said  the  painter. 
"Sometimes  it  comes  over  me  that  way.  Look- 
ing at  it  cold-bloodedly,  as  a  rational  being,  I  —  " 

"  Guglielmo !"  broke  in  the  signorina,uttering 
her  brother's  name  in  a  tone  of  gentle  admonish- 
ment. 

De  Angelis  smiled  under  the  rebuke,  and  took 
another  sip  of  the  nectar  which  the  stern  censor 
had  prepared  for  him. 

"We  will  waive  the  question  of  age,"  he  said 
apologetically.  "For  any  one,  old  or  young,  it 
was  something  to  see — for  once,  at  any  rate." 

"What  was  it  that  impressed  you  the  most?" 
asked  tht  forestiere,  still  curious. 

"The  spedators,  I  think,"  said  De  Angelis, 
meditatively.  "  I  mean  the  potentates  and  powers 
who  went  to  look  on." 

"What  potentates?  What  powers?" 

"We  used  to  go  to  the  street  which  leads  to 
St.  Peter's  on  Easter  morning  to  see  them  go  by, 
— cardinals,  ambassadors,  and  princes.  They  went 


in  state." 


"Gilt  coaches?"  queried  the  forestiere, 
"  Gilded  and  painted  like  a  Sevres  vase,"  an- 

i8i 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

swered  the  Roman.  "What  a  sight  they  were!" 

''What  a  sight!"  echoed  the  sister. 

"  Where  are  those  coaches  now,  Virginia  ?  They 
all  had  them — the  Borghese,  the  Chigi,  the  Co- 
lonna.  They  must  have  them  now,  somewhere. 
What  has  become  of  them?" 

"C^i  lo  sa — who  can  tell  ? "  answered  the  signo- 
rina. 

"And  the  human  adjunds,"  resumed  the  ar- 
tist, as  the  vision  of  the  thing  rose  up  before  him 
again — "such  lackeys,  such  clothes !  Cocked  hat 
on  the  box,  and  gold  lace  enough  for  a  major- 
general.  Also  two  more  bewigged  and  bepow- 
dered  beings  clinging  to  the  straps  behind." 

"Sometimes  three,"  correded  the  sister. 

"Sometimes  three,"  assented  the  painter. 
"  They  filed  through  the  Borgo  for  an  hour  before 
the  ceremony.  I  have  stood  there  and  watched 
them.  I  myself  have  stood  there — and  more  than 
once.  The  street  was  crowded.  Lackeys  ran  ahead 
to  clear  the  way.  They  shouted  their  masters' 
titles,  like  Puss  in  Boots  before  the  Marquis  of 
Carabas.  It  was  Oriental,  mia  cava  signora.  It  was 
simply  Oriental." 

His  description  of  it  made  it  seem  such  to  us. 
It  was  like  a  vision  of  the  Eastern  Empire.  It 
was  Constantinople  in  the  most  precious  moment 
of  its  decadence.  It  was  an  ensemble  of  infinite 
arrogance  and  infinite  obsequiousness.  It  is  what 
182 


THE  STUDIOS 

it  is  hopeless  to  see  now  anywhere  in  this  alarm- 
ingly radical  and  terribly  intelligent  Europe. 

De  Angelis  drained  off  the  last  saccharine  drops 
from  his  cup  and  set  it  down  on  the  low  table. 
"Virginia,"  he  said,"  where  are  those  long  Egyp- 
tians?" 

The  signorina  opened  a  drawer  and  produced 
the  contraband  articles.  At  the  same  time  it  oc- 
curred to  her  that  one  of  her  guests  had  not  yet 
seen  her  own  particular  and  exclusive  quarters; 
and  she  led  her  off  through  a  curtained  doorway 
to  some  invisible  portion  of  the  domain  not  yet 
explored. 

De  Angelis  took  a  small  wax  match  from  a  box, 
lighted  it  and  held  it  out  toward  me.  His  mind 
was  still  on  the  Church  and  its  pageantry,  as  his 
next  observation  indicated. 

"On  Thursday  evening,"  he  said,  "you  were 
at  St.  Peter's." 

"How  did  you  know  it?"  I  asked. 

"Because  tht  forestiere  is  unable  to  stay  away. 
If  the  papal  curia  should  wish  to  destroy  all  the 
foreign  heretics  in  Rome,  the  explosion  of  a  bomb 
or  two  in  St.  Peter's  on  the  evening  of  Holy 
Thursday  would  do  it.  The  only  trouble  about 
it  would  be  the  difficulty  of  separating  the  sheep 
from  the  goats." 

Then  he  added,  after  a  moment, — "But  it  is 
something  to  see,  I  concede." 

183 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

"The  washing  of  the  altar?" 

"No,  of  course  not.  But  to  see  the  church  in 
the  dark." 

"It  was  Hghted." 

"In  a  certain  sense,  yes.  They  hang  up  that 
cross  of  lights  under  the  dome,  and  they  put  one 
candle  in  each  bay  of  the  nave  and  transepts,  in 
an  iron  candlestick  on  the  floor.  That  makes  four 
candles  in  the  nave,  one  for  each  arch.  In  that 
great  cavern  it  is  as  four  of  these  matches  would 
be  in  this  room." 

I  was  obliged  to  admit  that  the  comparison 
was  just. 

"The  Church  understands  these  matters,"  he 
continued.  "In  St.  Peter*s  they  know  how  to  pro- 
duce an  effed.  They  have  studied  it  for  centu- 
ries. These  infinitesimal  lights  are  the  right  thing. 
I  can  even  imagine  that  it  might  inspire  a  religious 
feeling  in  certain  persons  of  sensitive  natures — 
feminine,  of  course — this  mysterious  gloom  and 
the  oppressive  stillness." 

"It  was  not  still.  The  people  were  moving  all 
the  time." 

"  But  the  point  of  it  is,"  interjeded  the  Roman, 
"that  no  one  speaks,  not  even  the  priests  at  the 
altar.  What  they  do  is  done  in  pantomime.  Their 
silence  is  part  of  the  effed.  And  the  incessant 
moving  of  the  crowd,  without  speaking,  is  part  of 
the  effed,  too.  The  world  seems  to  have  become 
184 


THE  STUDIOS 

suddenly  dumb.  You  hear  simply  the  swashing  of 
feet  on  the  marble  floor,  like  the  swash  of  water 
on  a  beach,  and  the  silence  is  more  impressive  than 
if  the  church  were  closed  and  empty." 

"There  was  that  rattle — that  watchman's 
rattle." 

"What  rattle? "  said  De  Angelis,  with  a  blank 
look  of  non-comprehension. 

"  The  rattle  that  was  sounded  to  attrad  atten- 
tion when  the  relics  were  held  up.  The  clatter 
was  deafening." 

De  Angelis  interrupted  with  a  shade  of  warmth. 
"  It  was  not  a  watchman's  rattle,"  he  said,  taking 
the  cigarette  from  his  lips  and  gesticulating  with 
it  between  his  fingers.  "  You  may  have  adopted 
the  mechanism  for  some  vulgar  purpose.  I  do 
not  know.  All  I  know  is  that  this  is  the  sacred, 
original  use.  We  invented  it.  We  have  always 
had  it." 

I  was  ignorant  enough  to  ask  why  they  did 
not  ring  a  bell. 

The  reply  came  instantly. 

"Because  it  is  Holy  Week.  No  bells  are  rung 
in  Holy  Week.  You  must  have  observed  it." 

Suddenly  the  silence  of  the  week  flashed  over 
me,  the  something  lacking  out  of  the  ordinary 
sensations  of  Roman  days,  which  we  had  been 
vaguely  conscious  of,  but  could  not  have  defined. 
Not  a  bell  had  been  rung  since  Monday. 

185 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

The  painter  broke  into  my  meditative  silence 
with  a  stream  of  reminiscences.  He  had  a  hun- 
dred things  to  say  about  the  old  Rome  and  the 
new;  about  the  hilarious  old  carnival,  and  the 
anemic  modern  thing  which  has  succeeded  it; 
about  many  things  which  were  better  in  the  old 
Rome  and  some  things  which  are  better  in  the 
new;  about  the  miry,  mispaved  old  streets  of 
fifty  years  ago,  where  one  stumbled  and  fell  at 
night  in  unbroken  blackness,  and  about  the  mar- 
vellous transformation  which  has  been  effeded 
in  the  modern  town  by  the  eledric  light  brought 
in  from  Tivoli,  where  the  dynamos  were  worked 
by  the  "headlong  Anio"  which  had  been  wast- 
ing its  superb  strength  since  the  days  of  Horace. 

The  reminiscences  continued  until  the  "  Egyp- 
tians" had  resolved  themselves  into  ashes. 

The  painter  was  still  talking  when  the  figures 
of  the  ladies  reappeared  on  the  balcony.  They 
had  gone  out  by  another  window  farther  along 
and  had  walked  back  toward  the  room  where  we 
were  sitting.  I  could  see  the  signorina  fingering 
the  leaves  of  the  plants,  lifting  and  turning  them 
in  an  intelligent  way  as  if  she  understood  them 
and  knew  what  their  natures  required. 

Something  attraded  her  attention  in  the  court- 
yard and  she  leaned  slightly  over  the  parapet, 
just  enough  to  bring  the  top  of  her  head  into 
the  sunshine.  Her  companion  leaned  over,  too. 
i86 


THE  STUDIOS 

It  was  evident  that  they  had  discovered  the  car- 
riage which  we  had  ordered  to  come  for  us,  wait- 
ing below.  I  had  noticed  the  noise  of  wheels  and 
the  clatter  of  hoofs  a  few  moments  before,  when 
the  vehicle  had  been  driven  in,  but  had  hesitated 
to  put  a  period  to  the  interesting  monologue. 

Evidently  the  moment  for  departure  had  ar- 
rived. Up  on  the  Pincio  there  was  a  fete  prepar- 
ing— indeed  already  prepared  and  waiting  to  be 
visited,  inspeded,  and  participated  in.  The  sun 
had  come  out  dazzlingly  brilliant.  It  would  form 
an  appropriate  accessory  to  the  music,  the  color, 
the  movement,  the  animation  of  the  open-air 
kermess  which  had  been  arranged  to  celebrate 
the  end  of  Lent. 

The  signorina  with  courteous  reludance  pro- 
duced the  light  wrap  of  which  she  had  relieved 
her  guest  on  entering,  and  we  moved  back  through 
the  sequence  of  rooms,  tapestried  with  their  in- 
finitude of  interesting  objeds,  toward  the  outer 
door. 

"Virginia,"  said  the  painter,  "if  you  were  a 
genuine  old  Roman  you  would  be  having  every- 
thing scrubbed  and  polished  this  afternoon,  to 
be  in  readiness  for  the  cure  and  his  holy  water 
this  evening." 

The  signorina  smiled.  She  seemed  to  be  re- 
signed to  her  state  of  decadence  from  the  old 
Roman  standard.  To  tell  the  truth,  the  scrub- 

187 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

woman  would  have  found  nothing  to  do.  There 
was  not  so  much  as  a  fleck  of  dust  to  be  discov- 
ered anywhere.  The  mistress  of  the  house  must 
have  pronounced  some  magic  incantation  over 
these  multitudinous  objeds  at  which  impurities 
had  vanished  like  evil  spirits  before  the  sign  of 
the  cross. 

They  followed  us  to  the  head  of  the  stairs  and 
bestowed  a  "Buona  Pasqua"  upon  us  as  we  de- 
scended. Up  at  the  kermess  Easter  was  already  in 
the  air.  The  World  had  abandoned  its  peniten- 
tial pose  and  gone  over  to  hedic  gaiety.  It  had 
cast  aside  its  sackcloth  and  donned  its  freshest 
finery.  Lent  was  clearly  moribund,  if  not  dead,  and 
would  leave  few  mourners  behind  at  its  demise. 


i88 


THE  BOOK-SHOPS 


CHAPTER  VIII 
THE  BOOK-SHOPS 

ON  looking  in  at  the  windows  of  the  popu- 
lar book-shops  in  theCorso  the  stranger 
in  Rome  is  apt  to  ask  himself  this  ques- 
tion— Is  there  any  contemporary  Italian  litera- 
ture? The  yellow-covered  produd:  of  the  French 
presses  seems  to  occupy  the  whole  field  and  con- 
stitute the  booksellers'  whole  stock  in  trade. 
French  is  everywhere — fidlion,  travel,  descrip- 
tion, even  history  and  sociology  and  the  other 
literary  produds  which  the  French  author  finds 
it  so  difficult  to  make  his  own  public  absorb  and 
which  one  would  least  of  all  suppose  likely  to 
tempt  an  Italian  book-buyer.  In  the  presence  of 
this  display  one  would  be  disposed  to  conclude 
that  the  booksellers  could  find  nothing  but  for- 
eign literature  to  submit  to  their  clientage  and 
that  the  Italian  writer  had  ceased  to  exist. 

Going  inside  of  the  shop,  one  finds  that  the 
French  contingent  in  the  dealer's  array  of  books 
is  not  quite  so  large  or  so  important  as  the  win- 
dow display  might  seem  to  indicate.  If  the  dealer 
is  pressed  on  the  subjed  of  Italian  literature, 
he  will  probably  be  able  to  astonish  his  foreign 
visitor  by  the  amount  of  the  article  which  he  is 

191 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

able  to  produce.  In  fad:,  the  number  of  contem- 
porary Italian  writers,  all  of  whom  are  illustrious 
or  most  illustrious  according  to  the  biographies 
of  them  to  be  found  in  the  handbooks  of  infor- 
mation on  such  subjeds,  is  appallingly  large.  And 
the  sole  reason  why  the  non-Italian  books  are  put 
to  the  front  in  the  windows  and  on  the  display 
counters  is  because  the  exotic  is  favored  every- 
where. It  is  so  even  in  Paris.  At  certain  times,  in 
that  busiest  of  all  book-making  marts,  we  seem 
to  have  nothing  but  the  non-Frenchmen  thrust 
in  our  faces.  Ibsen  and  Turgenieff,  and  Tolstoi 
and  Sienkiewicz,  and  D^Annunzio  and  De  Amicis 
are  paraded  before  us  until  we  would  be  excusable 
for  thinking  that  the  native  author  had  ceased  to 
write  and  that  his  editions  had  become  mere  curi- 
osities, left  to  be  resurredted  by  the  bibliophile. 
I  am  not  sure  that  De  Amicis  would  not  have 
had  a  more  comfortable  existence  if  he  had  simply 
established  himself  in  Paris  at  the  beginning  of 
his  career  and  made  that  his  literary  home  and 
working-place.  His  literary  bureau  might  have 
been  set  up  there,  with  its  three  stages  of  writ- 
ing, translating,  and  printing  all  going  forward 
under  his  own  personal  supervision,  and  with  the 
possibility,  after  a  certain  period,  of  eliminating 
the  intermediate  translating  stage  and  producing 
"copy"  diredlly  for  the  French  compositor.  He 
confesses  that  he  has  been  made  to  suffer  griev- 
192 


THE  BOOK-SHOPS 

ously  at  times  at  the  hands  of  the  translator. 
One  of  his  untadful  friends,  once  upon  a  time, 
sent  him  a  particularly  inaccurate  translation  of 
one  of  his  books,  which  had  just  been  put  on 
sale  on  the  boulevards,  with  all  the  blunders  of 
translation  carefully  marked.  The  attention  was  a 
doubtful,  a  very  doubtful  kindness.  The  wounded 
author  confessed,  in  referring  to  this  incident, 
that  he  would  have  much  preferred  to  remain  in 
ignorance  of  the  special  perversions  of  his  inten- 
tions which  his  translator  had  inflided  upon  him 
and  simply  know  without  details  that  he  had 
been  misunderstood  and  mis-rendered,  than  to 
have  the  whole  terrible  list  of  blunders  unfolded 
before  him.  Zola  was  fortunately  spared  all  this 
by  the  happy  circumstance  of  having  been  estab- 
lished in  France  in  the  person  of  a  previous  gen- 
eration of  his  race  before  he  himself  was  born. 
His  family  was  Italian  —  but  they  evidently  had 
a  certain  prescience.  Some  foreknowledge  of  the 
fad:  that  a  literary  celebrity  was  to  spring  from 
their  stock  in  a  later  generation  must  have  im- 
pelled them  to  emigrate  to  Paris  and  have  the 
boy  born  where  he  could  write,  naturally,  the 
language  which  is  the  most  widely  read  of  any 
Latin  tongue  and  which  would  enable  him  to 
reach  the  greater  part  of  his  readers  without  the 
intermedium  of  bungling  translations. 

The  Italian  writers,  in  the  matter  of  attaining 

193 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

personal  celebrity  among  their  own  people,  suffer 
from  the  circumstance  that  Italy  has  no  literary 
capital  where  they  can  all  congregate  and  stimu- 
late each  other  by  their  personal  rivalries  and 
animosities — or  by  their  personal  attachments 
and  mutual  adoration.  The  Italian  public  is  re- 
markably ignorant  as  to  where  its  authors  really 
live.  Not  so  very  long  ago  a  well-informed  Ro- 
man told  me  that  De  Amicis  lived  in  Genoa — 
and  as  a  matter  of  fad:  a  certain  branch  of  his 
family  did  once  live  there,  and  to  that  extent 
there  was  some  basis  for  this  particular  Roman 
misconception  on  the  point.  The  De  Amicis 
family  originated  on  the  Riviera,  and  one  mem- 
ber, at  least,  of  the  family — an  interesting  old 
man  whose  name  was  Marcello  De  Amicis  and 
who  gave  me  some  information  about  the  history 
of  his  race — lived  during  the  latter  years  of  his 
life  in  an  attractive  apartment  on  the  upper  floor 
of  a  Genoese  palace.  The  distinguished  writer, 
Edmondo,  however,  has  passed  most  of  his  life 
at  Turin,  and  still  lives  there  in  an  apartment 
on  the  Piazza  dello  Statuto,  a  large  square  sur- 
rounded with  modern  houses  in  the  quarter  of 
the  city  which  stretches  out  toward  the  western 
suburb. 

De  Amicis  had  the  good  fortune  to  win  the 
ear  of  the  public  with  his  first  book,  and  he  has 
held  the  attention  of  that  fickle  listener,  with  few 
194 


THE  BOOK-SHOPS 

lapses,  ever  since.  The  Sketches  of  MiUtary  Life 
which  he  wrote  over  thirty  years  ago  were  in- 
stantly successful — and  they  are  still  read.  His 
boy's  book  called  Cuore^  which  was  his  earliest 
venture  in  the  juvenile  field,  has  recently  passed 
its  two  hundred  and  twenty-fifth  Italian  edition 
and  has  also  been  much  translated.  De  Amicis 
keeps  in  the  drawer  of  his  study  table  at  Turin 
a  little  pamphlet  which  is  made  up  exclusively 
of  title-pages  of  translations  of  this  book,  show- 
ing the  existence  of  versions  in  all  the  known  lan- 
guages,— and  in  some  unknown  ones,  to  judge 
from  the  illegibility  of  the  alphabets  in  which 
they  are  printed.  The  story  has  had  several  edi- 
tions in  English  and  one  came  out  as  late  as  1 899 
at  Chicago.  The  hero  of  the  little  tale  is  a  boy 
of  chivalrous  impulses  and  a  rather  high-strung 
emotional  nature,  who  has,  one  must  confess, 
very  little  in  common  with  the  ordinary  boy  of 
Anglo-Saxon  antecedents.  He  is  an  extremely 
impressionable  type  of  youngster  who  would 
hardly  be  able  to  make  his  way  through  this 
rather  cold-blooded  and  unsympathetic  world 
without  a  considerable  amount  of  personal  dis- 
comfort. De  Amicis'  model  boy  is,  to  a  certain 
extent,  an  image  of  himself  As  a  young  man  he 
was  a  creature  of  exaggerated  sensibility,  and  as 
a  man  of  mature  years  he  obviously  retains  this 
peculiar  nature  which  he  was  perhaps  uncon- 

195 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

sciously  mirroring  in  this  early  story  of  boy-life. 

The  reputation  which  De  Amicis  has  won  for 
himself  outside  of  Italy  does  not  rest  so  much 
on  this  particular  book  as  on  his  volumes  of  de- 
scription, his  Holland,  his  Spain,  his  Morocco, 
and  his  Constantinople,  which  show  him  as  a 
traveller  and  an  observer.  These  have  been  long 
popular  and  still  continue  so.  A  few  stories  for 
adults  have  come  from  his  pen,  but  not  many. 
There  is  a  realistic  tale  of  the  life  of  an  Italian 
pedagogue,  called  the  Romance  of  a  School- 
master, which  was  published  in  1 890  and  has  had 
several  editions  in  Italian,  but  it  is  not  of  ex- 
ceptional merit  regarded  as  fidion.  What  really 
renders  it  valuable  is  the  perfe6l  literalness  with 
which  the  life  of  the  Italian  school-teacher,  as 
he  adually  exists,  is  put  upon  paper.  It  is  a  docu- 
ment, and  as  such  it  is  of  consequence.  Just  now 
De  Amicis  is  writingfragments  of  autobiography. 
A  volume  of  Memoirs  came  out  in  1900,  and 
another  which  he  calls  Recolledions  of  my  Child- 
hood and  School  Days,  in  1 90 1 .  The  last  volume 
before  these  was  the  Carrozza  di  tutti  (The  Om- 
nibus), a  book  of  impressions  of  social  types  pub- 
lished in  1899,  which  is  readable  throughout, 
though  not  perhaps  so  wholly  free  from  dull  pages 
as  some  of  his  earlier  books. 

The  field  of  novel-writing,  in  Italy,  is  fairly 
well  occupied,  and  upon  demand  the  booksellers 
196 


THE  BOOK-SHOPS 

on  the  CorsOj  or  in  the  Galleria  Vittorio  Emanuele, 
or  on  the  Via  Tornabuoni,  are  always  ready  to 
produce  something  of  Italian  make  which  is 
fresh  from  the  press.  And  yet  I  cannot  say  that 
these  books  get  translated  to  any  large  extent, 
or  that  they  absorbingly  interest  the  foreign 
reader.  Neither  do  the  authors  themselves — all 
of  them — become  as  famous  as  they  would  wish, 
or  hear  their  names  whispered  after  them  in  the 
street,  or  in  the  salons^  with  the  persistence  which 
bespeaks  a  profitable  notoriety.  A  full  year  after 
Giovanni  Verga  had  mounted  to  what  might  rea- 
sonably be  called  the  heights  of  celebrity,  as  the 
author  of  the  Cavalier ia  Ruslicana,  I  applied  for 
his  photograph  in  the  shop  of  a  leading  dealer 
in  Milan,  and  was  informed  by  the  person  in 
charge  that  the  individual  was  unknown  to  her. 
On  my  urging  her,  she  retired  into  some  inner 
sandluary  of  the  establishment  where  informa- 
tion on  such  recondite  matters  was  to  be  had,  if 
anywhere,  and  on  returning  produced  a  photo- 
graph of  Dodlor  Verga,  a  physician  and  medical 
writer  in  whom  I  was  wholly  uninterested.  Gio- 
vanni Verga  was  at  that  time  living  in  Milan, 
not  ten  minutes*  walk  from  the  photographer 
who  declined  to  be  aware  of  his  existence.  Since 
then,  it  is  due  to  him  to  say  that  his  photograph 
has  become  reasonably  familiar,  and  that — away 
from  Milan  at  least — it  is  not  difficult  to  obtain. 

197 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

The  Cavalleria  Rusticana  remains,  perhaps,  to 
this  day,  the  produdion  by  which  Verga  is  best 
known  to  us.  Other  stories  of  his  have  been  trans- 
lated into  English,  but  I  am  not  sure  that  they 
have  found  many  readers  outside  of  the  coterie 
which  specially  cultivates  literary  exotics.  /  Mala- 
voglia  has  been  out  in  an  English  version  for 
some  time,  and  probably  presents  its  author  to 
the  English  reader  in  an  asped:  which  is  as  attrac- 
tive, or  as  little  repellent,  as  any  which  could  have 
been  chosen.  The  Malavoglia  were  a  family  of 
Sicilians  of  the  humbler  class,  who  fell  into  hope- 
less decadence.  The  story  is  a  cumulative  record 
of  their  decline.  It  is  a  diminuendo,  worked  up 
perhaps  with  some  literary  acuteness  and  subtlety 
underneath — if  we  study  the  author's  methods 
from  the  point  of  view  of  conscious  literary  art — 
but  not  with  any  revelation  of  artifice  to  the  gen- 
eral reader.  In  the  end  the  family  goes  utterly  to 
wreck.  It  breaks  up  like  a  hulk  falling  into  frag- 
ments on  the  beach.  And  one  ends  the  tale  with 
this  mournful  pidlure  of  accomplished  decadence 
as  its  climax. 

The  booksellers  will  show  the  curious  foreigner 
other  stories  by  Verga,  if  desired,  including  the 
much  larger  and  more  complicated  story  called 
Mastro-don  Gesualdo;  but  the  list  of  his  works  all 
told  is  not  very  long.  Verga  seems  always  to  have 
aimed  at  quality  rather  than  quantity.  Apparently 
198 


Giovanni  Verga 

Author  of  Cavalleria  Rusticana 

From  a  photograph  by  Vianelli  of  Venice 


or  THE 

OF  . 


THE  BOOK-SHOPS 

he  has  never  taken  up  his  pen  unless  the  mood 
of  production  seized  him  irresistibly.  And  we 
have,  as  a  result,  the  kind  of  production  which 
is  naturally  to  be  looked  for  under  such  circum- 
stances— an  array  of  literary  creations  which  sur- 
prise one  by  the  smallness  of  their  bulk,  but  of 
which  every  page  is  alive  and  palpitating.  Serao, 
who  is  perhaps  equally  well  known  outside  of 
Italy,  has  written  much  more,  and  is  continually 
adding  fresh  volumes  to  her  list.  She  has  a  fond- 
ness for  detail,  which  Verga  does  not  have.  Her 
Paese  di  Cuccagna,  a  Neapolitan  story  which  has 
been  translated,  is  an  unrolling  panorama  of  con- 
temporary Neapolitan  life,  described  in  every 
phase  and  with  the  greatest  minuteness.  Other 
stories  of  hers  have  presented  other  aspedls  of 
Italian  life  with  similar  profuseness  of  detail.  Tak- 
ing her  literary  creations  together,  they  furnish  a 
comprehensive  pidure  of  Italian  life  of  our  own 
time  which  would  go  far  toward  enabling  the 
historian  of  the  future  to  reconstruct  it,  entire, 
if  by  any  accident  all  other  documents  on  the 
subjec5t  should  perish. 

Matilde  Serao  was  born  in  Greece  and  passed 
her  childhood  there.  In  her  Italian  life  she  has 
been  partly  at  Rome  and  partly  at  Naples.  Her 
husband,  Eduardo  Scarfoglio,  is  the  manager  of 
a  Neapolitan  journal.  She  has  herself  something 
of  the  temperament  of  a  journalist.  She  writes 

199 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

ofFhand,  and  sends  her  copy  to  the  printer  pradi- 
cally  in  the  form  in  which  it  leaves  her  pen,  with 
few  erasures  or  corredions.  Her  stories  unfold 
themselves  without  much  in  the  way  of  a  pre- 
conceived plan.  They  branch  out  into  dispropor- 
tionate episodes.  But  the  style  carries  the  reader 
along  by  the  very  force  of  its  spontaneous,  nat- 
ural, uncontrolled  advance.  Madame  Serao  is  a 
woman  of  lively  sympathies.  Some  of  her  stories 
are  documents,  or  rather  arguments,  for  the  sup- 
port of  a  cause.  She  is  humanitarian.  She  aims 
at  bettering  the  condition  of  the  sedtion  of  the 
Italian  public  which  suffers — and  which  is  pain- 
fully numerous  at  Naples.  Possibly  some  of  her 
stories  and  sketches  are  the  less  attradtive,  as 
literature,  because  of  this  philanthropic  purpose 
which  prompts  the  writing  of  them.  Persons  who 
live  in  a  boudoir  feel  this  thrusting  of  the  horrors 
of  poverty  upon  them  as  a  disagreeable  intrusion. 
It  is  not  what  they  look  for  in  a  story  which  is 
taken  up  as  a  mere  distraction  for  an  idle  moment. 
More  recent  than  the  fame  of  either  Serao  or 
Verga,  is  the  fame  of  Fogazzaro,  who  lives  and 
writes  at  Vicenza,an  interesting  town  of  northern 
Italy  which  the  tourist  rarely  visits.  Fogazzaro, 
who  began  his  literary  career  as  a  verse-writer, 
came  out  some  time  in  the  nineties  with  a  book 
called  the  Little  Old  World,  which  enjoyed  a 
great  vogue,  and  which  is  still  going  through  edi- 

200 


THE  BOOK-SHOPS 

tions.  It  was  not  his  first  story,  but  it  was  the  first 
to  win  him  a  place  among  the  most-read  writers 
of  the  day.  The  booksellers  put  the  volume  in  a 
conspicuous  place  in  their  windows  among  their 
most  recent  importations  from  Paris,  and  every 
one  was  told  to  read  it.  The  charm  of  the  story 
— for  it  clearly  has  a  charm — cannot  however  be 
relished  by  the  foreigner  who  is  not  intimately 
familiar  with  Italian  life.  We  have  certain  stories 
of  our  own  which  take  up  certain  phases  of  local 
life  with  which  we  are  familiar,  and  reproduce  it 
withxa  truthfulness  and  with  an  abnormal  acute- 
ness  of  insight  which  render  the  portrayal  in- 
expressibly fascinating.  But  half  the  fascination 
comes  from  the  fa6l  that  the  original  of  the  study 
is  something  which  we  profoundly  know.  Fogaz- 
zaro  told  a  story  of  life  in  the  lake  region  of  north- 
ern Italy,  which  brought  into  view  his  intimate 
familiarity  with  the  people  of  that  region.  The 
story  was  humanly  touching.  And  in  telling  it 
he  exhibited  a  capacity  for  minute  and  accurate 
diagnosis  of  charadter  which  was  truly  surprising, 
and  justly  led  to  the  recognition  of  his  talent  as 
something  highly  exceptional.  At  the  same  time, 
be  it  said  in  terms  of  unqualified  positiveness, 
such  a  story  cannot  be  appreciated  except  in  the 
most  imperfedl  manner  by  the  foreigner.  This 
particular  drawback,  which  I  am  here  alluding 
to,  places  all  stories  of  Italian  life  to  some  extent 

201 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

beyond  the  pale  of  our  appreciation.  The  ac- 
curacy of  the  study — its  fidelity  to  the  original 
— is  to  the  Italian  mind  half  its  charm,  while  to 
us  this  special  element  of  value  is  simply  non- 
existent. 

The  race  of  poets  is  not  yet  extind:  in  Italy, 
and  the  book-shops  still  display,  from  time  to 
time,  in  their  windows,  open  pages  of  metrical 
composition  from  the  pens  of  writers  in  whom 
the  public  takes  an  adual  and  living  interest.  The 
expedient  of  putting  single  poems  on  sale,  in  big 
letters  on  large  white  pages, — perhaps  only  eight 
or  ten  pages  to  the  whole  publication, — still  ob- 
tains in  this  land  where  poetry  is  native;  and  in 
this  way  the  great  verse-writers  get  their  words 
before  a  large  constituency  while  they  still  vibrate 
with  the  feeling  which  prompted  their  creation. 

Of  all  the  poets  Carducci  still  remains  clearly 
at  the  head,  as  he  has  been  for  many,  many  years. 
Shall  we  not  put  the  date  at  1 869,  with  the  pub- 
lication of  the  unique  poetic  protest  against  the 
Ecumenical  Council,  as  the  decisive  beginning 
of  his  national  fame?  Later,  in  1878,  he  made  a 
second  step,  a  distind  one,  in  advance,  in  his  Ode 
to  the  Queen.  Since  that  time  he  has  been,  in  ef- 
fed:,  the  Italian  poet  laureate — although  legally 
that  office  does  not  exist  in  Italy  as  it  does  in 
England.  He  has  no  stipend.  He  was  never  for- 
mally inscribed  on  any  page  of  any  official  register 
202 


THE  BOOK-SHOPS 

as  poet  to  the  House  of  Savoy,  but  In  efFed:  he 
is  the  laureate  all  the  same.  His  adhesion  to  the 
monarchy  had,  and  has,  something  noble  in  it. 
It  is  uncolored  by  servility  or  obsequiousness. 
He  retains  his  personal  independence.  He  still 
speaks  with  a  freedom  of  speech  which  is  at  times 
alarming.  But  his  loyalty  is  something  profound, 
nobly  genuine,  solid  as  a  rock. 

His  Ode  to  the  Queen  was  the  outcome  of 
peculiar  circumstances  which  he  has  himself  nar- 
rated in  an  inimitable  manner.  Carducci  was,  in 
his  youthful  days  of  storm  and  stress,  a  repub- 
lican— a  rather  ardent  one.  He  even  stood  for 
eledion  to  the  Italian  Chamber  of  Deputiesunder 
that  ruddy  flag,  and,  more  than  that,  was  eleded. 
But  in  1 878,  the  very  year  of  her  accession.  Queen 
Margherita  came  to  Bologna  (where  he  lived)  in 
the  course  of  a  royal  progress  made  by  the  new 
sovereigns  through  their  dominions ;  and  as  the 
result  of  that  visit  his  political  views  underwent 
a  very  radical  change.  Carducci  caught  a  glimpse 
of  the  queen  on  the  afternoon  of  her  arrival,  as 
she  passed  through  the  streets  on  her  way  from 
the  station  to  the  palace  where  the  royalties  were 
to  be  entertained,  and  the  glimpse,  brief  as  it  was, 
gave  his  republicanism  a  severe  shock.  Later  she 
appeared  upon  the  balcony  of  the  palace,  in  the 
evening,  robed  in  white  and  flashing  with  jewels, 
while  the  poet  stood  with  the  multitude  in  the 

203 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

square  below ;  and  his  republican  convidions  were 
still  more  seriously  undermined.  The  next  day 
he  was  personally  presented  to  the  queen — who 
already  knew  his  work  and  had  expressed  a  desire 
to  see  him — and  he  surrendered  completely  and 
unreservedly  to  the  fascination  of  her  mind  and 
manner.  The  Ode  to  the  Queen  was  written 
shortly  afterward,  and  became  immediately  the 
talk  of  Italy.  Since  that  moment  he  has  never 
once  faltered  in  his  personal  and  political  alle- 
giance to  the  monarchy. 

Carducci  has  written  prose  as  well  as  verse,  and 
those  of  us  who  have  followed  his  production, 
step  by  step,  for  years,  and  watched  it  through 
all  its  phases,  know  how  extraordinary  is  the  fibre 
of  his  mind.  I  remember  a  certain  transatlantic 
voyage,  taken  in  company  with  four  or  five  vol- 
umes of  Carducci,  which  is  made  unique  in  my 
recolledion  by  that  daily  contact  with  a  great 
mind.  Carducci  presents,  in  one  person,  the  un- 
usual combination  of  a  studious  and  lyric  tem- 
perament. For  forty  years  he  has  been  professor 
of  Italian  literature  at  Bologna,  and  his  profes- 
sorial life  has  been  laborious  and  produdlive  to 
an  extraordinary  degree.  At  the  same  time  he  has 
continually  been  creating  verses  which  vibrate 
with  lyric  intensity,  and  in  which  his  other  nature 
—  his  learned  nature — is  only  visible  in  the  ele- 
gance of  his  didion  and  the  classic  quality  of  his 
204 


THE  BOOK-SHOPS 

metres.  As  a  savant  he  has  accumulated  a  library 
of  choice  books,  in  the  midst  of  which  he  lives 
and  which  he  would  naturally  be  sorry  to  have 
dispersed.  Knowing  his  desire  to  keep  his  col- 
ledion  together,  Queen  Margherita  has  recently 
purchased  the  entire  library,  not  with  the  inten- 
tion of  taking  it  into  her  own  possession  but  with 
the  idea  of  saving  it  from  being  broken  up.  Car- 
ducci  is  to  have  the  use  and  possession  of  the 
books  as  long  as  he  lives,  and  after  that  they  are 
to  be  deposited  in  some  public  place,  probably  at 
Bologna,  where  they  can  continue  usefully  acces- 
sible, as  a  monument  to  their  former  possessor. 
Some  efforts  have  been  made  to  translate  Car- 
ducci  into  English,  and  the  versions  of  Mr. 
Sewall,  published  in  New  York,  did  much  toward 
conveying  an  idea  in  our  language  of  the  spirit 
and  dash  of  the  original.  A  few  of  the  other  con- 
temporary poets  have  also  been  partly  trans- 
lated. Ada  Negri  has  been  intelligently  inter- 
preted in  English  by  Adelheid  von  Blomberg, 
a  German  writer  of  varied  linguistic  attainments 
who  is  now  living  in  Rome.  D'Annunzio  is,  as 
yet,  better  known  by  his  novels  than  by  his 
poetry.  He  has  however  accomplished  the  won- 
der of  making  the  Italian  public  listen  to  a  tra- 
gedy in  verse.  Verse  goes  down  with  difficulty, 
it  must  be  conceded,  everywhere.  And  a  tragedy 
in  verse  represents  absolutely  the  most  unpalat- 

205 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

able  form  of  poetry.  The  Francesca  da  Rimini, 
however,  has  been  heard  in  several  of  the  prin- 
cipal Italian  cities,  and  is  evidently  still  to  be  heard 
in  others,  as  well  as  abroad;  and  in  forcing  twen- 
tieth-century audiences  to  accept  this  form  of 
literary  art,  which  has  never  been  stridlly  native 
anywhere  since  the  days  of  Queen  Elizabeth, 
the  poet-dramatist  has  certainly  accomplished  an 
extraordinary  feat. 

Among  the  so-called  serious  writers  I  think 
Villari  would  by  general  consent  be  given  the  first 
place.  Villari  has  had  a  remarkably  productive 
life.  What  he  has  done  is  monumental  in  its  bulk 
as  well  as  in  its  solid  and  enduring  quality.  And 
yet  his  career  began  with  storm  and  stress — in 
short  under  circumstances  which  might  naturally 
have  drawn  him  quite  away  from  a  studious  ex- 
istence and  shaped  for  him  a  life  very  different 
from  that  which  he  has  adually  led.  As  a  young 
man  at  Naples  he  was  intimately  associated  with 
the  painter  Domenico  Morelli  (who  afterward 
became  his  brother-in-law)  and  other  youths  of 
progressive  tendencies,  and  all  of  them  rushed 
together,  hot-headed,  toward  their  baptism  of 
revolution  in  the  emeute  of  1848.  Morelli  was 
caught  by  the  police  and  imprisoned,  and  Villari 
found  it  prudent  to  leave  Naples  and  betake 
himself  to  Florence.  In  his  Florentine  asylum, 
however,  he  found  some  leisure  for  produdive 
206 


THE  BOOK-SHOPS 

literary  work,  outside  of  his  bread-winning  oc- 
cupations, and  has  since  then  moved  steadily 
toward  ever  greater  and  greater  distinction.  His 
very  first  literary  effort  was  a  small  pamphlet  de- 
voted to  the  praise  of  one  of  Morelli's  pidures, 
and  from  time  to  time,  in  the  years  which  fol- 
lowed, he  put  into  print  some  of  his  observations 
and  reflexions  in  matters  of  art.  But  his  really 
important  literary  work  has  lain  in  another  field. 
After  he  had  established  himself  at  Florence, 
Florentine  history  came  very  naturally  to  exer- 
cise a  potent  attradion  over  him;  and  this  pro- 
found interest  in  a  fascinating  subjed  led  first 
to  the  production  of  his  great  work  on  Savona- 
rola, and  afterward  to  his  work  on  Machiavelli. 
Both  of  these  have  been  printed  and  reprinted 
in  English,  and  new  editions  are  undoubtedly 
still  to  come  out.  Those  who  are  competent  to 
judge  assert  that  they  utter  the  last  word  on  the 
subject,  and  must  continue  to  do  so  until  new 
sources  of  original  information  are  unearthed 
from  some  as  yet  unknown  hiding-place. 

The  Villari  home  at  Florence  is  an  interesting 
and  attractive  one.  The  house  is  large  and  stands 
on  a  broad  avenue  leading  toward  the  charming 
suburbs  for  which  Florence  is  so  famed.  Villari*s 
treasures  include  not  only  valuable  books  but 
valuable  pictures,  among  them  being  a  portrait 
of  himself  by  Morelli  and  other  paintings  from 

207 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

that  same  master  hand.  Madam eVillari,  —  Linda 
Villari, — who  presides  over  this  home,  is  nearly 
as  well  known  to  English  readers  as  her  husband. 
She  is  herself  English,  as  we  all  know,  and  writes 
her  native  language  naturally,  as  would  be  ex- 
peded.  Beside  her  own  original  books,  she  has 
furnished  most  valid  support  to  her  husband  in 
putting  his  histories  into  English  form ;  and  they 
doubtless  owe  part  of  their  success  as  literature, 
with  us,  to  this  remarkably  sympathetic  as  well 
as  intelligent  translating.  She  has  also,  occasion- 
ally, lent  her  talent  as  a  translator — for  it  is  a 
distind  talent  in  itself — to  other  writers,  and 
notably  in  rendering  in  English  the  narrative  of 
the  Duke  of  the  Abruzzi's  expedition  to  Mount 
St.  Elias,  which  was  published  in  London  in 
1900.  More  recently  Madame  Villari  has  been 
assisting  her  husband  with  the  English  version 
of  his  Barbarian  Invasion  of  Italy,  a  work  just 
coming  out,  and  in  which  the  historian  has,  per- 
haps, adopted  a  slightly  more  colloquial  and 
popular  style  of  writing  than  has  hitherto  been 
his  custom  in  dealing  with  historical  subjedts. 

There  is  one  other  name  which  comes  natu- 
rally to  the  surface  in  this  connexion,  because  it 
belongs  to  a  historical  writer  who,  like  Madame 
Villari,  is  semi-Italianized.  A  little  over  ten  years 
ago — it  was  in  1890  to  be  precise  —  a  book  of 
short  biographies  of  Italian  patriots  came  out, 
208 


THE  BOOK-SHOPS 

which  bore  on  the  title-page  the  name  of  the 
Countess  Evelyn  Martinengo  Cesaresco.  Those 
who  took  up  this  volume  and  noted  the  mastery 
of  English  which  its  author  displayed,  wondered 
who  this  new  writer  was,  and  whether  she  was 
English  and,  if  so,  how  she  came  to  have  such 
a  name.  The  riddle  has  since  been  solved — for 
those  for  whom  it  was  a  riddle.  The  countess  was 
born  Evelyn  Carrington.  She  was  the  daughter 
of  an  English  rural  dean.  And  she  married  an 
Italian  nobleman  whom  political  proscription  had 
happened  to  make  familiar  with  England  and 
English  people.  The  Martinengos  were  a  great 
family  who,  in  the  last  national  struggle,  sided 
with  the  liberal  cause ;  and  it  was  perhaps  natural 
enough  that  the  Countess  Evelyn  should  find  an 
inspiration  in  this  circumstance  and  that,  upon 
becoming  allied  to  this  house  of  patriots,  she 
should  think  and  talk  politics,  and  also,  finally, 
write  them.  Her  book  of  short  biographies  was, 
I  believe,  her  first  literary  venture  in  this  field. 
Led  on  by  the  fascination  of  the  subjed,  she 
extended  her  research  much  farther  and  in  1894 
brought  out  her  book  on  the  Liberation  of  Italy 
which  is  a  masterpiece  of  its  kind.  Any  one  who 
wishes  to  know  the  history  of  that  great  struggle 
without  any  conscious  effort  in  the  absorption 
of  it,  should  read  this  book.  Every  word  in  it  is 
alive.  It  is  an  extraordinary  case  of  the  entire  as- 

209 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

similation  of  a  subject,  so  that  in  the  final  dash- 
ing-ofF  of  the  written  page  not  a  single  trace  of 
compilation  is  left  visible. 

The  Martinengo  family  has  had  several  his- 
toric houses  in  and  near  Brescia.  There  is  one 
in  Brescia  itself  which  has  been  turned  into  a 
museum,  and  there  are  others  at  Rovato  west- 
ward and  at  Salo  eastward  which  still  belong  to 
the  family.  It  is  the  one  at  Salo,  on  the  Lago  di 
Garda,  which  I  believe  is  the  favorite  residence  of 
the  Countess  Evelyn.  The  house  stands  on  the 
edge  of  the  water  and  is  very  large  and  imposing. 
It  was  visited  by  Lady  Mary  Wortley  Montagu 
in  the  course  of  her  continental  peregrinations 
and  of  it  she  wrote  a  glowing  description  to  her 
daughter,  saying  that  it  was  "  the  finest  place  she 
had  ever  seen."  "The  king  of  France  has  nothing 
so  fine/*  she  wrote.  "It  is  large  enough  to  enter- 
tain all  his  court." 

It  was  in  this  stately  home  of  the  Martinengos 
that  the  Liberation  of  Italy  was  finished  in  1 894, 
and  since  then  the  countess  has  completed  there 
a  third  book  of  Italian  history,  which  came  out  in 
1898  in  the  form  of  a  short  biography  of  Cavour 
— a  work  which  shows  the  same  grasp  of  the  sub- 
jed:  and  the  same  vividness  of  statement  as  the 
more  comprehensive  volume  which  preceded  it. 
Her  more  recent  publications  lie  outside  of  the 
historical  field,  but  those  who  know  the  books  to 
210 


THE  BOOK-SHOPS 

which  I  have  referred  will  hope  that  she  may  un- 
dertake the  presentation  of  some  other  special 
phases  of  the  great  Italian  epic  of  the  nineteenth 
century  before  she  abandons  the  subjed  alto- 
gether. Few  persons  now  living  have  the  double 
knowledge  of  Italian  fads  and  of  English  readers 
which  this  writer  possesses,  and  few  are  so  per- 
fectly qualified  to  perform  the  difficult  and  deli- 
cate task  of  interpreting  the  one  to  the  other  suc- 
cessfully. 


211 


ON   THE   HEIGHTS 


CHAPTER  IX 
ON  THE  HEIGHTS 

THE  foreigner  who  has  the  rashness  to 
face  the  summer  heat  of  Italy  must,  if 
he  wishes  to  be  comfortable,  abandon 
the  scorching  levels  and  betake  himself  to  the 
heights.  He  must  get  away  from  the  plains  and 
climb  up  where  he  can  breathe. 

He  can  choose  either  town  or  country.  If  he 
eleds  the  country,  there  are  villas  everywhere, 
lying  vacant,  for  his  occupancy.  If  he  chooses  the 
towns,  there  are  several  breezy  heights  which 
beckon  to  him.  He  may  climb  the  acropolis  of 
Orvieto.  He  may  go  higher  and  farther  north 
and  poise  at  Perugia.  He  may  venture  still  farther 
northward  and  halt  his  flight  at  Siena.  We  did 
the  last. 

Wherever  he  goes  the  life  will  be  the  same. 
In  the  summer  one  does  not  work,  one  idles. 
The  days  pass  with  the  monotony  of  days  at 
sea.  Each  one  is  like  the  one  before  it.  And  the 
one  after  it  will  be  the  same.  The  slightest  dis- 
traction is  greedily  fastened  upon  and  economi- 
cally made  the  most  of 

O  n  a  certain  morning,  when  we  had  been  several 
weeks  on  the  Sienese  hill-top,  we  watched  Caterina 

215 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

carry  out  the  breakfast  things  with  the  conscious- 
ness that  when  the  door  closed  behind  her  we 
should  be  confronted  once  more  with  the  ever 
fresh  problem  of  what  to  do  with  the  day.  The 
door  closed.  The  problem  faced  us.  We  looked 
at  each  other  in  silence. 

Madame  went  to  the  window  and  looked  out. 
It  was  August.  The  towns  of  the  plain  were  in 
their  summer  Purgatory  —  Inferno,  it  may  have 
seemed  to  some  of  them.  Rome  was  under  the 
blight  of  malaria.  Florence  was  sweltering  beside 
a  shrunken  Arno.  Milan  was  swaying  in  heat- 
waves like  the  top  of  a  furnace. 

A  voice  from  the  window  suggested  that  we 
should  go  down  to  the  terrace  and  make  photo- 
graphs. The  light  was  precisely  right.  The  neces- 
sary mementos  of  the  spot  were  still  waiting  to  be 
made.  The  suggestion  seemed  opportune.  We 
found  the  camera  and  descended. 

Marco,  the  gardener,  was  the  sole  occupant  of 
the  place.  He  was  watering  the  plants  in  a  little 
garden  of  exotics  which  bordered  the  terrace  on 
the  south,  and  his  orbit  could  be  distinctly  traced 
by  the  splashes  of  water  on  the  pavement  as  he 
went  back  and  forth  between  the  terra-cotta  tub 
which  contained  his  source  of  supply  and  his 
cherished  parterres  of  fragile  foreign  plants.  Be- 
low the  terrace  he  had  another  garden  of  sturdier 
flowers,  mostly  zinnias  and  marigolds,  to  which 
216 


The  Terrace 


ON  THE  HEIGHTS 

he  paid  little  attention,  evidently  regarding  them 
as  hardy  plebeians  in  the  social-horticultural  scale, 
who  could  take  care  of  themselves.  They  were 
however  a  welcome  element  in  the  general  efFe6l 
and  brightened  that  particular  part  of  the  fore- 
ground with  an  agreeable  touch  of  vivid  color. 

The  terrace  offered  a  number  of  subjedls  for 
the  camera,  but  the  one  which,  on  the  whole, 
pleased  us  best  when  the  prints  were  finally  com- 
pared was  the  view  looking  back  from  the  gar- 
den of  exotics  through  the  arches  which  sepa- 
rated it  from  the  paved  area.  Marco  had  left  a 
ladder  leaning  up  against  one  of  these  arches 
which  was  a  slight  blemish  in  the  pidure,  but  it 
furnished  evidence  of  his  industry  and  interest 
in  keeping  his  little  domain  in  a  tidy  and  orderly 
condition.  He  had  been  making  an  effort  to  train 
the  vines  which  fell  in  a  tangled  curtain  over  the 
openings  and  had  successfully  cleared  them  away 
from  the  central  arch.  Through  this  opening  one 
got  a  glimpse  of  the  arches  on  the  farther  side 
of  the  terrace  and  caught  sight  in  the  distance 
of  a  dome  which  placed  itself  with  gratifying  ex- 
adlness  precisely  in  the  centre  of  the  field  of  view. 

The  dome  belonged  to  a  church  where  a  cer- 
tain Don  Luigi  was  canon — an  individual  to 
whom  we  were  introduced  soon  after  our  arrival 
at  Siena  and  whom  we  came  to  know  very  well 
before  our  sojourn  there  was  ended.  The  church 

217 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

was  called  Santa  Maria  di  Provenzano  and  was, 
I  believe,  the  only  one  in  Siena  which  had  a 
chapter  of  canons  beside  the  cathedral.  On  im- 
portant occasions  the  canons  of  Santa  Maria  di 
Provenzano  were  invited  up  to  the  cathedral  and 
sat  in  the  choir  in  claret  robes  lined  with  pearl 
color  while  the  fundion — whatever  it  might  have 
been — was  in  progress.  On  ordinary  days  they 
went  about  in  the  ordinary  black  of  the  Latin 
clergy,  with  no  colored  possibilities — unless  it 
happened  to  rain,  when  it  was  not  uncanonical 
to  carry  a  colored  umbrella.  We  once  met  the 
whole  chapter  issuing  from  their  sacristy  door, 
on  one  of  those  rare  days  of  rain  which  some- 
times occur  in  a  Tuscan  summer,  carrying  um- 
brellas which  were  as  gaudy  as  Marco's  zinnias. 
It  was  a  startling  spedacle  to  us  who  were  un- 
prepared for  it,  and  our  almost  open-mouthed 
wonder  must  have  caused  these  matter-of-fa6t 
ecclesiastics  no  small  amount  of  curiosity  and 
surprise. 

Marco  watched  the  photographing  process  for 
a  few  moments  with  some  interest  and  then,  with 
transparent  intentions,  proceeded  to  make  up  a 
multicolored  bouquet  of  his  choicestflowers  which 
was  duly  presented  to  Madame  as  we  left  his 
domain.  The  flowers  were  bound  together  with 
many  revolutions  of  coarse,  stout  twine,  and  it 
was  naturally  our  first  solicitude  to  remove  this 

2l8 


ON  THE  HEIGHTS 

murderous  cord,  when  we  had  finally  escaped 
from  the  gardener^s  observation,  and  give  the 
strangled  stems  an  opportunity  to  perform  their 
proper  fundion  in  the  vase  of  water  in  which 
they  were  bestowed. 

Caterina  had  taken  possession  of  our  quar- 
ters during  our  absence  on  the  terrace  and  had 
busied  herself  in  putting  things  to  rights.  She  had 
straightened  the  grammars  and  didtionaries  on 
the  table — sole  indication  which  the  room  offered 
of  any  serious  occupation — and  had  pushed  the 
chairs  into  positions  of  trim  propriety  against  the 
walls.  She  had  also  sprinkled  the  floor  as  a  slight 
palliative  to  the  heat.  It  was  an  ordinary  floor  of 
broad  brick  tiles  and  water  could  not  hurt  it.  The 
quickness  with  which  the  drops  evaporated  gave 
us  an  indication  of  the  temperature.  Sometimes 
we  could  see  them  contrad:  and  disappear  with 
a  visible  shrinkage  of  the  outline.  On  such  days 
it  was  well  to  settle  down  to  a  morning  of  com- 
plete repose,  even  at  the  cost  of  complete  bore- 
dom, rather  than  take  the  physical  consequences 
of  exercise  in  that  sultry  air. 

On  this  particular  morning  the  drops  stayed 
damp  upon  the  floor  longer  than  usual,  and  we 
decided  to  risk  the  exertion  of  a  walk  to  the  pi- 
azza. The  preparations  for  the  Assumption  Day 
races  were  in  progress.  They  were  to  be  cele- 
brated in  the  great  square  in  the  centre  of  the 

219 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

town,  according  to  ancient  custom,  and  the  place 
was  being  got  in  readiness  for  them.  By  keeping 
close  to  the  walls  of  the  houses  it  would  be  pos- 
sible to  reach  the  spot  without  once  stepping  on 
the  sunlit  pavement.  And  the  possible  distrac- 
tion which  the  excursion  offered  was  enough  to 
tempt  us  out. 

Although  our  palazzo  on  the  terrace  side  was 
quite  open  and  commanded  an  extensive  view 
from  its  windows  of  the  country  beyond  the 
city  walls,  it  was,  on  the  opposite  side,  compa6tly 
mortised  into  the  solid  masonry  of  the  town. 
The  door  upon  this  inner  side  opened  diredly 
upon  a  narrow  street  bordered  by  high  buildings 
and  paved  from  wall  to  wall  without  sidewalks. 
And  this  narrow  street  connected  with  others  and 
still  others,  forming  a  bewildering  network  with- 
out system  and  without  method. 

It  required  some  skill  as  a  pilot  to  thread  these 
narrow  winding  ways  and  not  get  lost.  Their 
turnings  and  twistings  were  perpetual.  One  could 
rarely  see  from  one  corner  to  the  next.  The  ex- 
perience of  many  previous  rambles,  however,  had 
given  us  a  partial  clew  to  the  labyrinth.  And  on 
this  particular  excursion  we  had  no  difficulty  in 
making  the  proper  turns  and  arriving,  after  a 
walk  of  not  unnecessary  length,  in  the  great  open 
area  which  formed  the  central  breathing-space  of 
the  town. 

220 


ON  THE  HEIGHTS 

The  opening  was  surrounded  with  a  hetero- 
geneous company  of  buildings,  old  and  new, 
high  and  low,  pinnacled  and  plain.  Down  in  the 
middle  of  the  lower  side  was  the  grim  old  Gothic 
master  of  the  place,  and  by  its  side  a  slender 
tower  shot  upward  to  a  dizzy  height.  The  top 
of  that  tower  saw  everywhere  and  knew  all  the 
secrets  of  the  town.  It  pried  even  into  our  dis- 
tant garden,  and,  when  the  moon  was  low  behind 
it,  the  ghostly  shadow  of  it  rested  in  a  black  line 
across  our  flower  beds  and  stretched  out  into  the 
open  fields  beyond. 

Around  the  upper  rim  of  the  square,  against 
the  palaces  and  shops,  some  seats  were  at  that 
moment  going  up  —  of  the  sort  which  mature 
their  mushroom  growth  on  the  eve  of  a  popular 
show.  At  the  lower  edge  of  them  was  the  fidion 
of  a  balustrade,  contrived  out  of  boards,  canvas, 
and  paint;  and  between  the  barriers  ran  the 
race-course,  following  the  irregular  outline  of 
the  square. 

It  was  a  strange  arena,  with  sharp  corners  and 
sudden  ups  and  downs.  Nothing  made  it  toler- 
able for  the  use  to  which  it  was  put,  except  its 
generous  size  and  its  openness.  Not  a  tree  ob- 
scured it  or  shadowed  it.  Not  an  obstrudion 
broke  the  surface  of  the  pavement  except  the 
small  square  enclosure  of  the  Fonte  Gaja  which 
rose  opposite  the  town  hall.  At  this  moment  the 

221 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

space  had  no  human  population  except  the  work- 
men who  were  raising  the  seats.  The  shops  were 
closed  perforce  by  the  tiers  of  benches  which 
barricaded  their  very  doors.  And  the  usual  ac- 
tivity of  buying  and  selling  was  postponed  until 
the  festivity  should  be  over. 

The  broad  acreage  of  sunlit  pavement  did  not 
tempt  us  to  any  further  explorations,  and  we 
walked  back  to  the  house  through  the  shadowy 
depths  of  the  protected  streets.  After  our  return 
there  was  nothing  to  do  but  to  wait  for  luncheon, 
and,  when  luncheon  was  over,  for  the  visit  of 
Don  Luigi  in  the  afternoon.  Don  Luigi  came 
every  day,  after  the  hour  of  siesta,  to  brush  up 
our  Italian;  and  upon  the  very  stroke  of  four 
his  hand  was  sure  to  be  laid  upon  the  lever  of 
the  latch  and  his  bowing  figure  to  be  seen  in  the 
doorway. 

The  bow,  always  the  same,  was  executed  with 
downcast  eyes  and  a  hand  carried  to  the  region 
of  the  heart.  No  one  but  an  Italian  could  bow 
with  that  exquisite  grace,  and  no  one  but  a  priest 
could  master  the  expression  which  went  with  it. 

Don  Luigi  was  spiritual  but  by  no  means  weak. 
His  canonical  duties  occupied  only  a  small  por- 
tion of  his  time,  and  his  real  business  in  life  was 
teaching  Greek  to  dull  boys  in  the  neighboring 
seminary.  Years  of  persistent  effort  in  driving  a 
repugnant  language  into  immature  brains  had 

222 


ON  THE  HEIGHTS 

given  him  an  amount  of  pedagogic  muscle  which 
I  have  never  seen  surpassed.  The  morning  was 
no  strain  upon  him  at  all.  He  came  to  us  in  the 
afternoon  apparently  fresher  than  when  he  com- 
menced his  Greek  class ;  and  in  turning  to  Italian 
he  had  the  immense  advantage  of  passing  from 
a  field  where  he  was  relatively  a  stranger  to  one 
where  he  was  absolutely  at  home. 

We  shall  never  forget  those  hours  of  linguistic 
struggle  passed  in  thecompany  of  thisintelledual 
athlete.  H  is  method  was  the  interrogative  method. 
The  pupil  was  made  to  talk,  in  spite  of  himself, 
by  persistent  and  pitiless  questioning.  Don  Luigi 
felt  or  feigned  a  profound  interest  in  all  the  great 
and  small  matters  of  our  life  at  home.  He  assailed 
us  on  politics,  on  religion,  on  horticulture,  on 
education,  on  cookery,  and  on  ethnology.  There 
was  no  department  of  human  adivity  into  which 
he  did  not  boldly  and  resolutely  enter  and  drag 
us  after  him.  After  an  hour  of  his  merciless  mas- 
sage the  mental  system  of  the  patient  was  left  in 
a  state  of  entire  collapse,  requiring  an  extended 
period  of  complete  rest  for  the  recovery  of  normal 
elasticity. 

When  the  ordeal  was  over  and  the  door  had 
closed  upon  the  duplicate  of  the  opening  bow, 
Caterina  was  usually  sent  for,  to  order  a  carriage. 
There  was  not  much  to  drive  to ;  but  merely  to 
settle  back  upon  the  cushions  and  inhale  the 

223 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

cool  air  of  the  later  afternoon  without  speaking, 
was  a  refreshment  and  a  source  of  infinite  mental 
relief.  The  plan  of  ordering  the  carriage  through 
Caterina  had  been  early  adopted  in  part  from 
motives  of  convenience  and  in  part  from  motives 
of  policy.  We  discovered  that  the  operation  se- 
cured her  a  small  addition  to  her  revenues  with- 
out adding  anything  to  our  own  expense,  which 
was  regulated  by  the  cab-tarifF.  She  went  to  the 
nearest  stand  and  simply  offered  us  to  the  driver 
who  would  promise  her  the  largest  commission. 
An  audioneering  process  took  place  in  which  we 
were  daily  knocked  down  to  the  highest  bidder. 
The  carriages  themselves  were  so  equally  good 
and  so  equally  poor  that  it  made  little  difference 
to  us  what  or  whom  she  selected.  And  the  drives 
were  simply  a  zigzag  down  from  one  gate  and  a 
zigzag  up  to  another ;  always  a  descent  into  the 
valley  which  surrounded  the  town  like  a  moat, 
and  a  re-ascent  of  the  incline  to  get  back  to  the 
high  level  of  the  plateau. 

Sometimes,  on  days  when  the  lesson  hour  had 
left  us  a  small  balance  of  energy,  we  walked  to  the 
fortress  on  the  western  edge  of  the  town,  or  had 
ourselves  driven  to  the  gate  of  the  old  stronghold 
and  left  the  carriage  there,  while  we  climbed  to 
the  ramparts  and  enjoyed  the  prosped. 

The  fortress  was  built  on  a  promontory  of  the 
plateau,  and  on  the  western  side  the  wall  dropped 
224 


ON  THE  HEIGHTS 

abruptly  to  a  great  depth.  At  one  corner  a  big 
polygon  of  ancient  masonry  flung  itself  out 
into  space — one  of  the  bastions  which  in  the 
days  of  the  Medici  had  been  mounted  with  can- 
non but  which  was  now  planted  with  flowers. 
The  enclosure  was  a  large  one  and  a  trim  gravel 
walk  led  around  the  entire  circuit  of  the  ram- 
parts. On  the  western  side  the  view  was  superb, 
and  some  stone  benches  had  been  considerately 
placed  there  by  the  military  authorities,  which 
made  it  possible  to  sit  down  with  some  com- 
fort and  enjoy  the  outlook  at  one's  leisure. 

At  evening  the  spot  was  even  more  fascinat- 
ing than  by  daylight.  The  valley  appeared  to 
sink  down  to  a  greater  depth  below  one  and  the 
sky  seemed  to  fill  the  whole  world.  The  air  was 
cool  and  fresh.  The  invisible  flowers  from  the 
garden  on  the  bastion  exhaled  a  faint  evasive 
odor.  And  whiffs  of  music  were  wafted  out  to 
us  from  the  band  playing  behind  us  in  the  Lizza. 

Looking  one  night  from  our  own  windows, 
over  the  stretch  of  undulating  country  which 
surrounds  the  town  on  all  sides,  we  caught  sight 
of  a  novel  feature  in  the  prosped.  There  were 
points  of  light  on  all  the  summits.  The  more 
distant  ones  were  mere  balls  of  phosphorescence. 
The  nearer  ones  flared  and  vibrated  in  evident 
flame.  These  beacons,  as  we  found,  were  the  an- 
nouncement of  the  Assumption,  a  festival  which 

225 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

IS  one  of  great  importance  everywhere  in  Latin 
countries,  but  which  in  Siena  is  the  particular 
high  feast  of  the  year.  At  a  certain  critical  mo- 
ment, several  centuries  ago,  when  Siena  and  her 
deadly  rival  Florence  were  combating  in  a  life 
and  death  struggle,  the  Madonna  of  the  Assump- 
tion appeared  in  person  in  the  clouds  and  spread 
her  protedlive  asgis  over  the  Sienese.  Since  that 
day  her  festival  has  been  venerated  with  an  espe- 
cial veneration  and  the  beacon-fires  which  herald 
it  are  kindled  on  all  the  heights  of  the  Tuscan 
uplands. 

It  is  indeed  too  precious  a  festival  to  be  al- 
lowed to  pass  with  only  one  day's  celebration. 
The  festivities  last  over  several.  The  races  were 
set  for  the  afternoon  of  the  third  day  and  were 
placed  after  sunset  so  that  the  piazza  might  be 
in  shadow  and  the  air  fresh  and  cool.  Among 
the  lesser  doings  which  preceded  them  the  more 
interesting  was  a  certain  fundion  observed  earlier 
in  the  same  day  and  regarded  as  a  necessary  pre- 
lude to  the  race.  It  was  not  a  great  show  in  it- 
self, but  it  preserved  a  quaint  and  curious  practice 
of  great  antiquity. 

We  went  down  to  see  this  earlier  spedacle, 
which  took  place  in  a  small  church  in  the  poorer 
part  of  the  town.  The  church  was  entered  from 
the  street  by  very  low  steps.  It  had  a  plain  brick 
floor  inside;  and  was  almost  as  bare  as  a  stable. 
226 


ON  THE  HEIGHTS 

The  walls  were  covered  with  plain  whitewash. 
At  the  farther  end  was  the  principal  altar,  railed 
off  by  a  balustrade ;  and  part  way  down  the  side 
was  a  lesser  altar,  up  a  few  steps  from  the  floor, 
with  a  coarsely  painted  pidure  above  it. 

Through  the  sacristy  door  as  we  entered  the 
church  we  could  see  two  young  men  standing 
and  talking  with  each  other.  One  of  them  was 
a  priest,  with  a  round  face  and  a  good-natured 
air,  dressed  in  the  usual  black  cassock  worn  by 
the  common  clergy.  The  other  was  a  layman — 
very  much  a  layman,  evidently — and  attired  in 
a  costume  which  was  much  less  reticent  as  to  the 
good  points  of  his  figure  than  the  priest's  cas- 
sock. He  wore  doublet  and  hose,  a  complete 
mediaeval  dress  from  head  to  foot.  The  doublet 
clung  to  his  well-modelled  torso.  The  long  hose 
showed  the  contour  of  every  muscle  of  his  shapely 
legs.  Indeed  his  whole  figure  seemed  to  have 
been  run  into  his  clothes  in  a  molten  state,  so 
smooth  and  sleek  and  free  from  wrinkles  was 
his  entire  exterior. 

Every  now  and  then  the  youth  in  mediaeval 
dress  left  his  cassocked  companion  and  went  to 
the  street  door  of  the  church  as  if  to  reconnoitre. 
And  after  the  fifth  or  sixth  of  these  journeys  he 
came  back  with  information  which  was  evidently 
of  some  special  moment. 

The  priest  hastily  put  on  a  tunic  of  cotton  lace 

227 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

over  his  cassock  and  walked  to  the  side  altar.  An 
acolyte  took  his  station  beside  him.  There  was 
a  commotion  at  the  threshold  and  a  bewildered 
horse  stumbled  and  clattered  into  the  church. 
He  was  accompanied  on  his  entry  by  a  company 
of  young  men  in  mediaeval  dress,  who,  with  some 
difficulty,  persuaded  him  over  the  pavement  and 
induced  him  to  face  around  at  the  altar. 

The  horse  was  one  of  the  runners  in  the 
prospective  race.  He  was  an  undersized,  wiry 
creature  of  the  Corsican  breed,  sure  of  foot  and 
good  at  turning  sharp  corners.  The  young  men 
who  accompanied  him  were  from  the  particular 
contrada  or  ward  of  the  city  which  the  horse 
represented.  The  jockey  was  somewhere  among 
them.  There  were  also  the  captain  of  the  contrada, 
and  several  standard-bearers  and  pages. 

All  of  the  company  were  in  doublet  and  hose, 
except  one,  who  was  in  metal.  His  armor  was  an 
admirable  piece  of  work.  It  was  all  in  plates  ex- 
cept a  brief  space  of  chain-mail  around  the  hips, 
but  it  was  hinged,  with  the  most  cunning  fore- 
thought, for  every  possible  turn  of  a  muscle,  and 
he  moved  in  it  as  freely  as  if  it  had  been  made 
of  rubber.  Not  a  particle  of  the  man  himself  was 
visible  except  his  face,  which  showed  a  perspir- 
ing surface  behind  the  open  visor. 

The  priest  put  on  a  stole  and  commenced 
reading  from  a  book — somewhat  hastily.  The 
228 


ON  THE  HEIGHTS 

tenor  of  what  he  read  was  hidden  underneath 
the  Latin  words,  but  it  was  understood  to  be  in 
the  nature  of  a  blessing.  The  horse  breathed 
rapidly  and  fanned  his  ears  around  in  search  of 
every  noise.  He  was  the  only  living  creature  pres- 
ent who  did  not  enjoy  the  proceedings.  Even  the 
priest  evidently  took  in,  and  relished,  the  comedy 
of  the  situation. 

The  hurried  Latin  came  to  an  end,  and  the 
book  was  closed.  A  holy-water  sprinkler  was 
taken  by  the  chief  ecclesiastic  from  the  hands 
of  the  acolyte  and  a  shower  of  drops  was  vigor- 
ously rained  on  the  horse.  The  animal  started 
back  in  alarm,  and  the  crowd  behind  him  scat- 
tered in  some  merriment. 

Fortunately  for  the  timid  and  nervous  quad- 
ruped this  was  the  end  of  the  fundion.  He  was 
led  back  toward  the  door,  and  after  a  sudden  and 
decided  protest  at  the  sight  of  the  steps,  he  con- 
sented to  go  down  them  and  out  into  the  street. 
The  leather  curtain  dropped  heavily  back  into 
place  behind  him,  and  with  the  closing  of  the 
aperture  ended  this  unique  prelude  to  the  races. 

A  few  hours  later  we  waded  up  through  ascend- 
ing levels  of  humanity  to  a  place  on  one  of  the 
upper  seats  in  the  great  piazza,  opposite  the 
palace  with  the  battlemented  front  and  the  slen- 
der tower.  The  effed  of  the  jam  of  human  be- 
ings, in  front  of  us  and  all  around  us,  surveyed 

229 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

from  this  height,  was  extraordinary  and  scarcely 
lessened  by  the  fac5b  that  we  had  been  battling 
with  the  crowd  for  twenty  minutes  in  the  effort 
to  get  there. 

Men  and  women,  women  and  men,  were  every- 
where. The  immense  area  of  the  pavement  moved 
incessantly  with  them.  The  race-track  itself  was 
full  of  them.  They  were  in  all  the  balconies,  in 
all  the  windows.  They  covered  the  roofs  of  the 
houses  and  looked  out  from  between  the  battle- 
ments. Some  of  the  more  daring  spirits  had  even 
climbed  to  the  summit  of  the  Mangia  Tower  and 
stood  in  little  openings  which,  from  below,  had 
seemed  hardly  large  enough  for  the  windows  of 
a  dove-cote. 

At  one  side  of  the  square  was  a  great  palace 
which  was  occupied  by  the  descendant  of  a  papal 
family.  The  owner  of  this  great  house  had  draped 
his  balcony  with  red  and  had  invited  a  company 
of  friends  to  enjoy  the  spedlacle  with  him  from 
this  very  excellent  point  of  view.  From  other 
windows  and  balconies  colored  draperies  of  vari- 
ous hues  were  hungout,and  their  lighter  tints  did 
much  toward  relieving  the  severity  and  gloomi- 
ness of  the  old  Gothic  architedure.  The  balcony 
of  the  town  hall  opposite  us  had  its  parapet  en- 
tirely concealed  by  crimson  hangings,  and  upon 
it  were  arrayed  the  higher  fundtionaries  of  the 
town  and  the  ladies  of  their  families. 
230 


ON  THE  HEIGHTS 

A  Sienese  acquaintance.  Signer  Peruzzi,  had 
consented  to  accompany  us  on  this  occasion  and 
perform  the  duties  o^ cicerone.  Don  Luigi  was  de- 
barred by  his  cloth  from  being  present.  It  would 
not  have  been  decorous  for  a  priest  of  his  rank 
to  sit  on  the  open  benches  of  the  improvised 
amphitheatre,  and  if  he  was  looking  on  at  all  he 
must  have  been  in  one  of  the  windows  where  he 
could  witness  the  spedacle  without  being  seen. 

The  dull  crash  of  a  cannon  set  the  air  to  beat- 
ing about  our  ears,  and  while  it  was  still  echoing 
a  party  of  mounted  carbineers  rode  out  from  the 
courtyard  of  the  old  palace  and  proceeded  to 
clear  the  track  of  the  multitude  which  had  in- 
vaded it.  It  took  them  nearly  fifteen  minutes  to 
make  the  circuit  of  the  square  and  force  the  tur- 
bid stream  of  humanity  back  inside  the  barriers. 
There  was  another  crash,  following  their  com- 
pletion of  the  circuit.  And  then,  over  at  the  right, 
where  an  entering  street  made  a  mere  cleft  be- 
tween the  high  houses,  something  began  to  move 
and  to  work  itself  into  the  piazza. 

Signor  Peruzzi  ceased  to  study  the  group  of 
people  on  the  Marchese  Chigi*s  balcony  and 
turned  his  opera-glass  over  to  where  the  strange 
confusion  of  moving  forms  and  colors  was  be- 
ginning to  show  itself.  "  It  is  the  procession," 
he  said. 

"What  procession?"  we  asked. 

231 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

"The  one  which  comes  before  the  race.  The 
forestieri  usually  think  it  is  the  best  part  of  it. 
For  us  it  is  nothing.  It  is  an  old  story." 

The  forms  and  colors  came  more  distinctly 
into  view.  There  was  a  line  of  trumpeters  in  front. 
After  them  came  a  man  on  horseback  with  a  flag 
— the  sinister  black  and  white  emblem  of  Siena. 
Behind  the  man  on  horseback  was  a  motley  mass 
of  moving  figures,  some  on  foot,  some  on  horses, 
pressing  out  into  the  square  in  an  ever  length- 
ening file. 

"The  Goose  is  ahead,"  said  Peruzzi,  with  his 
glass  at  his  eyes. 

We  begged  to  be  enlightened  as  to  what  the 
goose  might  be,  inasmuch  as  no  such  creature 
was  visible  in  proper  zoological  shape. 

"The  contrada  of  the  Goose,"  he  explained. 
"Each  contrada  or  ward  of  the  city  has  an  em- 
blem. There  is  the  Goose,  the  Dragon,  the  Eagle, 
the  Porcupine,  the  Turtle,  even  the  Snail.  There 
are  seventeen  of  them.  They  have  their  emblems 
on  their  banners.  You  can  see  them,  perhaps,  if 
you  take  the  binocle." 

He  pushed  the  glass  into  my  hands,  and  the 
swaying  vaguenesses  suddenly  took  on  definite 
shapes.  The  costumes  showed  up  in  sharp-lined 
patchworks  of  harlequin  tints.  The  faces  became 
moving  physiognomies  of  agitated  humanity. 

I  conceded  that  it  might  be  the  Goose.  No 
232 


ON  THE  HEIGHTS 

human  being  but  a  Sienese  could  possibly  have 
told.  The  creatures  were  done  in  heraldic  hiero- 
glyphs. They  were  mere  symbols  of  the  beasts 
and  birds,  rendered  in  forms  which  had  been 
made  sacred  by  local  tradition. 

"Do  all  the  contradas  race?" 

"  No,"  said  Peruzzi. "  Only  ten  of  them.  There 
would  not  be  room  for  all  in  this  narrow  course. 
But  the  whole  seventeen  march  in  the  proces- 
sion." 

The  motley  crowd  came  finally  around  in  front 
of  us.  The  costumes  were  of  every  possible  hue. 
The  clash  of  colors  was  almost  audible.  It  was  the 
savage  fury  of  the  Middle  Ages,  done  into  a  battle 
of  rank  greens,  of  raw  yellows,  of  rabid  reds. 

The  racing  companies  were  in  elevens.  Two 
horses  went  in  each,  one  with  a  cavalier  on  his 
back,  one  riderless. 

"What  is  the  led  horse  for?"  we  asked. 

"It  is  the  racer,"  said  Peruzzi. 

"  But  he  has  no  saddle,"  we  remonstrated. 

"There  will  be  no  saddles,"  returned  the 
Sienese. 

"How  will  the  jockeys  stay  on  at  the  corners?" 

"  That  is  their  affair,"  said  Peruzzi,  laconically. 

"But  look  at  that  turn  over  there.  They  must 
take  it  at  full  speed.  Those  horses  are  varnished. 
They  have  been  groomed  to  the  last  possibility. 
No  man  can  possibly  stay  on." 

233 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

"They  don't,  always,"  admitted  Peruzzi. 
"The  whole  ten  went  off,  once,  at  that  very 
point.  That's  what  they  have  the  mattresses 
there  for." 

The  palisade  which  edged  the  course  was,  in 
fad,  hung  with  mattresses.  We  might  have  no- 
ticed them.  It  was  a  merciful  provision. 

The  procession  marched  slowly  around  the 
arena  and  broke  up  at  a  gaudily  decorated  stand 
which  had  been  ereded  under  the  grim  and  time- 
stained  walls  of  the  palace  diredlly  opposite  us. 
The  whole  masquerade,  with  its  flags,  clambered 
up  without  order  or  system  upon  the  seats  and 
remained  there  in  a  solid  block  of  flamboyant 
color  during  the  rest  of  the  show. 

For  the  moment  nothing  happened  or  gave 
signs  of  happening.  The  oracle  at  our  side  gave 
us  to  understand  that  in  some  convenient  and 
neighboring  obscurity  the  prospedive  riders  were 
changing  their  clothes.  It  was  going  to  be  a  rough 
affair.  There  was  no  need  of  dragging  their  vel- 
vets in  the  dirt  or  of  having  them  cut  by  slashes 
of  a  rival's  whip. 

"They  use  their  whips  on  each  other?"  we 
asked. 

"Yes.  It  is  a  part  of  the  game.  It  is  author- 
ized and  sanctioned  by  tradition,  duella  canaglia 
la  giW — he  pointed  to  the  plebeian  crowd  which 
filled  every  inch  of  standing  room  inside  of  the 
234 


ON  THE  HEIGHTS 

arena — "are  greedy  for  it.  It  is  the  spice  of  the 
contest  for  them.  You  will  notice  the  whips. 
They  are  of  rawhide  with  a  thick  butt  and  a 
tapering  point.  The  riders  hold  them  usually 
by  the  point.  It  gives  more  width  to  the  blow." 

The  contestants  streamed  into  view  at  last, 
stripped  of  their  gay  plumage.  They  were  as 
beautiful  as  pheasants  prepared  for  the  spit.  Over 
in  the  farther  corner  they  were  marshalled  broad- 
side across  the  track.  It  was  a  slow  process  de- 
termining their  positions  and  getting  them  in 
line.  At  length  some  one  gave  an  invisible,  in- 
audible signal,  and  they  were  unleashed. 

Almost  before  one  could  be  sure  that  a  start 
had  been  made  we  heard  the  nearing  thuds  of 
the  hoofs,  and  the  bony  creatures,  with  their 
necks  craned  forward,  were  coming  toward  us. 
It  was  a  scramble,  a  struggle,  a  confusion  of  mov- 
ing limbs,  human  and  equine — and  they  were 
past.  Every  one  rose  instindlively  as  they  ap- 
proached that  fatal  corner  where  the  mattresses 
were  hung  up.  The  jockeys  pulled  spasmodi- 
cally, instindively,  at  the  reins.  Shoulders  went 
back  almost  to  the  rumps.  Knees  came  up  nearly 
to  the  withers.  With  no  stirrup-purchase,  could 
they  do  it? 

The  spedlators  looked  on  wistfully,  longingly, 
hopefully.  But  no  gratifying  casualty  occurred. 
The  laws  of  gravitation  and  centrifugal  force 

235 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

were  successfully  defied.  The  cape  was  weath- 
ered. The  Corsicans  were  plunging  down  the 
slope  which  descended  to  the  front  of  the  old 
town  hall  and  were  scrambling  up  the  ascent  on 
the  other  side.  In  a  moment  more  they  had  re- 
gained the  starting-point  and  had  commenced 
the  second  lap. 

"How  many  rounds?*'  we  asked,  automati- 
cally. 

"Three  always,"  said  Peruzzi,  with  his  eyes 
glued  to  the  contestants  and  not  turning  his 
head  as  he  spoke. 

In  that  second  circuit  we  could  see  things 
more  distinctly,  analytically, — with  a  separation 
of  impressions.  The  riders  were  too  far  apart  to 
strike  each  other.  Whether  they  did  or  not  in 
that  first  bewildering  sweep,  no  one  could  pos- 
sibly have  told.  The  horses  were  getting  it  now. 
They  were  being  mercilessly  scourged.  Down 
came  the  blows  from  arms  raised  higher  than  the 
shoulders — the  flailing  sounding  like  hard  sticks 
on  a  barrel.  The  deafest  could  have  heard  it  even 
above  the  shouts  of  their  neighbors  on  the  seats 
and  the  pandemonium  of  noises  which  came  up 
from  the  standing  crowd  below. 

As  for  those  frantic  partisans, — the  rabble 
down  by  the  track, — they  were  cheering,  curs- 
ing, blessing,  anathematizing,  deriding,  and  pray- 
ing. Not  a  sound  of  the  human  throat  or  a  fierce 
236 


ON  THE  HEIGHTS 

emotion  of  the  human  soul  was  lacking  in  that 
turbulent  tumult  or  its  prompting  passions.  At 
the  second  doubling  of  the  fearsome  promontory 
the  bloodthirsty  multitude  had  one  consolatory 
mouthful  thrown  into  its  maw.  A  single  rider  fell. 
Who  he  was  or  how  the  accident  had  happened 
no  one  could  say.  The  man  was  gone — swallowed 
up  in  the  earth,  it  seemed.  All  that  one  could  cer- 
tainly see  was  that  the  riderless  horse  was  dash- 
ing down  the  hill  alone — bewildered,  terrified, 
and  a  menace  to  the  rest. 

The  others  slashed  at  him  with  their  whips 
as  they  passed,  and  finally  drove  him  out  of  the 
course.  We  watched  breathlessly  for  fresh  inci- 
dents and  catastrophes  in  the  final  round.  But 
none  came.  The  flailing  continued,  but  it  was 
futile.  The  leader  was  far  ahead.  The  vidory  of 
the  Goose  was  certain — had  indeed  been  evident 
from  the  ending  of  the  second  sweep.  Its  sup- 
porters were  already  struggling  across  the  oval 
toward  the  finish  corner,  ploughing  a  way  roughly 
through  the  jam,  to  share  in  their  champion's 
triumph. 

The  panting  vidor  came  rushing  in  far  in  ad- 
vance of  the  rest.  It  was  useless  for  the  others 
to  try  to  finish.  The  multitude,  no  longer  re- 
pressible,  surged  into  the  course.  Vidory  de- 
termined the  color  of  all  wavering  partisans. 
Every  one  seemed  to  belong  to  the  contrada  of 

237 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

the  Goose.  An  immense  bird,  which  had  been 
kept  somewhere  out  of  sight  until  that  moment, 
was  produced,  was  held  shoulder-high,  was  al- 
lowed to  croak  its  hoarse  note  of  triumph  and 
to  flap  its  huge  gray  wings  in  token  of  the  vic- 
tory. Over  in  the  corner  we  could  dimly  see  that 
the  rider  was  being  carried  off  on  the  shoulders 
of  his  adorers — those  who  were  fortunate  enough 
to  be  able  to  get  near  him. 

The  crowd  scattered  rapidly  at  the  conclusion 
of  the  race  and  in  a  quarter  of  an  hour  the  piazza 
was  almost  as  vacant  as  it  had  been  at  midday. 
The  component  elements  of  the  great  throng 
had  gone  away  to  sit  down  to  delayed  dinners 
or  suppers  and  to  discuss  the  vicissitudes  of  the 
contest  which  had  just  ended.  What  contrada  will 
win  is  a  subjedl  of  much  speculation  in  advance 
and  perhaps  of  some  wagering  of  values,  though 
not  to  a  very  pernicious  extent.  The  problem  of 
probabilities  is  complicated  by  the  fad  that  none 
of  the  contradas  knows  precisely,  until  the  day 
of  the  race,  what  horse  is  going  to  run  for  it.  A 
number  of  horses  are  brought  out  to  participate 
in  the  contest,  and,  after  the  best  ten  have  been 
seleded,  each  ward  is  assigned  a  champion  by 
lot.  Superstition  has  something  to  do  with  the 
local  conjedures  as  to  the  probable  winner.  The 
contrada  in  which  the  house  of  St.  Catherine  is 
situated,  and  which  has  the  Goose  as  its  emblem, 
238 


ON  THE  HEIGHTS 

is  supposed  to  be  specially  favored.  Doubtless 
the  outcome  of  the  race  just  described  was  at- 
tributed to  the  intercession  of  that  powerful  saint. 

A  week  after  the  contest  in  the  piazza  we 
were  walking  with  Don  Luigi,  through  the  nar- 
row streets  of  the  town,  taking  an  open-air  les- 
son, when  we  came  quite  unexpededly  upon  the 
epilogue  of  the  race.  More  stridly  speaking,  it 
was  the  epilogue  of  the  epilogue,  for  the  lights 
were  out,  the  theatre  deserted,  and  nothing  left 
to  show  what  had  been  happening  except  the 
wreckage  and  remnants  of  this  convivial  after- 
piece. 

Tables  had  been  set  in  the  open  street  of  the 
winning  contrada  and  a  banquet  of  protraded 
courses  had  been  served.  The  health  of  the  man 
and  the  animal  who  had  collaborated  in  the  vic- 
tory had  been  drunk,  perhaps  too  deeply.  The 
orgy  had  continued  until  daylight.  What  we  saw 
of  it  when  we  came  to  insped:  the  scene  of  the 
revelry  was  merely  the  battered  scenery  of  the 
littered  stage.  Dejeded  and  limp  decorations  still 
hung  from  some  of  the  houses.  And  above  our 
heads  there  was  a  tangle  of  wires  from  which  red 
and  green  lamps  had  been  suspended  when  the 
wassail  was  at  its  height. 

With  the  Assumption  festivities  finally  over, 
we  were  thrown  back  upon  other  resources  for 
our  amusement.  I  will  not  detail  them  here.  They 

239 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

consisted  in  the  deliberate  inspedion  of  the  sights 
of  the  town  and  excursions  into  the  environs. 
Out  of  this  material  we  found  languid  occupa- 
tion—  sufficient  for  one's  summer  energies — for 
many  weeks.  The  Heights  claimed  us  until  the 
approach  of  autumn,  save  for  an  occasional  de- 
scent to  lower  levels  when  we  felt  the  need  of 
decided  change  and  the  stimulus  of  contadt  with 
things  wholly  new.  When  the  torrid  season  had 
finally  given  place  to  the  distind  and  unmis- 
takable chill  which  visits  this  land  of  sunshine 
with  the  shortening  days,  we  abandoned  our  quiet 
palazzo  and  our  tranquil  terrace,  and  went  back 
to  the  more  stirring  existence  of  the  larger  towns. 


240 


BY  THE  SEA 


CHAPTER  X 
BY  THE  SEA 

ON  a  certain  day,  while  Siena  still  con- 
tinued to  be  our  nominal  abiding-place, 
we  left  its  breezy  heights  and  descended 
to  the  seashore. 

Our  journey  took  us  over  the  very  route  which 
a  drop  of  water  would  have  taken  descending 
from  Siena  to  the  sea.  Almost  in  sight  of  our  ter- 
race we  touched  the  Elsa,  the  little  stream  which 
trickles  through  the  valley  below  the  town.  And 
beside  its  stony  bed  we  travelled  for  an  hour  or 
more  until  we  reached  the  Arno  and  came  out 
into  the  broad  levels  of  its  fertile  plains. 

Pisa  brought  us  to  a  reludlant  halt,  for  we  were 
impatient  to  be  at  our  goal  beyond.  Under  the 
great  shed  of  the  station  we  paused  rebelliously 
and  were  glad  to  be  out  again  in  the  open  coun- 
try on  the  farther  side.  The  last  stage  of  the  jour- 
ney took  us  across  the  desolate  Maremrna,  its 
unpopulated  spaces  beautiful  in  their  wildness. 
Cattle  were  visible  here  and  there,  but  never  in 
herds.  Solitude  seemed  to  be  in  the  spirit  of  the 
place.  Even  the  stone-pines  rose  alone — one 
here,  one  there — as  if  they  shunned  companion- 
ship and  coveted  isolation. 

243 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

The  station  at  Leghorn  brought  us  again  in 
touch  with  hurrying  life  and  modern  common- 
placeness.  The  porters  contended  for  one's  lug- 
gage. The  hotel  agents  swooped  down  upon  their 
prey.  The  drive  from  the  station  to  the  shore  in 
the  torrid,  plush-upholstered  van  in  which  they 
enclosed  us  seemed  interminable.  It  led  all  the 
way  through  narrow  streets  bordered  by  endless 
rows  of  yellow  houses  climbing  six  and  seven 
stories  skyward.  There  was  not  a  break  in  their 
serried  ranks,  until  we  finally  came  out  on  the 
broad  boulevard  by  the  sea,  and  were  drawn  up 
at  the  doorway  of  our  place  of  entertainment. 

Inside  of  the  spacious  caravansary  we  found  a 
different  climate.  The  crossing  of  the  threshold 
plunged  us  into  a  cooling  bath.  Somewhere  a 
breeze  had  been  found  which  did  not  exist  out- 
side and  had  been  made  to  circulate  through  the 
lofty  halls  and  corridors.  The  room  to  which  the 
civil  servant  showed  us  was  a  compound  of  cool 
suggestions.  Its  floor  was  of  stone  mosaic.  Its 
bedsteads  were  of  iron.  Its  chairs  were  of  unup- 
holstered  wood.  Its  draperies  were  of  the  filmiest 
kind. 

At  our  arrival  the  population  of  the  place  was 
quite  invisible.  It  was  in  siesta.  The  sensitive, 
high-bred  Italians  who  composed  the  exclusive 
clientage  of  the  resort  were  in  their  rooms,  sleep- 
ing or  doing  nothing,  while  the  sun  held  sway 
244 


BY  THE  SEA 

outside.  For  us  such  total  and  complete  inadion 
was  impossible.  Madame  descended  to  the  read- 
ing-room and  scanned  the  venerable  periodicals. 
Her  companion  ventured  boldly  into  the  open 
and  took  a  survey  of  the  torrid  world  outside. 

A  garden  fronted  the  hotel  and  stretched  its 
shrubbery  down  to  the  marine  promenade.  Be- 
yond that  level  roadway  a  parapet,  low  and  broad, 
defined  the  edge  of  terra  firma  and  limited  the 
aggressions  of  the  sea.  The  Mediterranean,  which 
washed  the  base  of  the  parapet,  flashed  under 
the  midday  sun  in  a  thousand  facets  of  dazzling 
light.  Out  on  the  rocks  some  boys  were  bath- 
ing. Their  brown  skins  were  tanned  to  the  color 
of  old  bronze.  They  might  have  been  bronzes 
themselves  if  the  exuberance  of  Latin  life  had 
not  kept  them  in  incessant  motion.  Once  they 
climbed  up  out  of  the  sparkling  flood  and  posed 
in  polished  petrifications  for  a  whole  minute  on 
the  scorching  rocks.  Then  they  slid  down  again 
like  seals  into  the  shimmering  bath. 

Farther  along  the  shore,  but  still  near  the 
hotel,  a  pier  ran  out  into  the  water,  bordered  by 
bathing-places  for  the  politer  and  maturer  world. 
These  bathing-places  were  redangles  of  canvas 
covered  with  canvas  overhead,  and  thus  proteded 
both  from  the  sun  and  from  the  observation  of 
the  passers  on  the  promenade.  The  spaces  were 
small  and  inconvenient.  Swimming  would  have 

245 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

been  impossible  inside  of  them  of  course.  They 
were  mere  open-air  bath-tubs  without  the  bother 
of  pipes  and  plumbing.  For  certain  persons  this 
timid  expedient  was  the  proper  thing.  And  for 
those  who  required  more  water,  there  was  always 
the  whole  sea  outside  with  not  a  barrier  this  side 
of  Corsica. 

Later  in  the  day,  when  the  sun  had  become 
less  fierce,  we  pressed  into  our  service  one  of  the 
small  fiacres  which  stood  in  front  of  the  hotel  and 
took  a  drive  southward  toward  the  distant  prom- 
ontory of  Antignano,  which  projects  with  a  certain 
mild  audacity  into  the  sea.  The  Leghornese  coast 
performs  no  surprising  scenic  feats.  It  holds  it- 
self in  a  gentle  reserve,  not  absolutely  refusing  a 
few  concessions  to  the  appetite  for  rocks  and  head- 
lands, but  satisfying  the  public  demand  without 
freaks  or  antics. 

We  bowled  past  a  thin  line  of  stunted  trees, 
with  tops  of  filmy  green,  dimly  suggesting  aspara- 
gus in  the  form  unknown  to  denizens  of  towns. 
The  genus  seems  peculiar  to  Leghorn,  and  ap- 
pears to  have  been  brought  to  the  spot  from  an 
unknown  shore  by  some  boulevard  builder  bent 
upon  novelty.  After  a  sweep  or  two  of  the  road- 
way a  gate  rose  before  us,  flanked  with  the  little 
custom-houses  where  the  city's  revenues  were 
colleded.  And  beyond  there  was  something  like 
open  country  with  yellow  and  pink  and  violet 
246 


BY  THE  SEA 

villas  showing  fragments  of  their  fronts  through 
high  gates  and  tropical  vegetation. 

We  continued  along  the  boulevard  to  the  little 
suburb  of  Ardenza,  where  a  summer  colony  set- 
tled itself  many  years  ago.  An  old  semicircular 
building,  made  up  of  different  dwellings  with  a 
casino  in  the  middle,  was  still  standing  there,  sym- 
metrical and  stately  in  its  design.  Down  by  the 
water  was  a  pier  with  bathing-places  Hke  those  at 
Leghorn,  and  back  of  the  casino  there  were  more 
villas.  Our  driver  emphasized  the  importance  of 
the  spot  as  a  residence  of  celebrities.  The  Grand 
Duke  used  to  come  there  from  Florence  when 
there  was  a  Grand  Duke.  Donna  Francesca  Gari- 
baldi had  a  house  somewhere  in  the  neighborhood 
— the  widow  of  the  red-shirted  hero,  his  relid:  as 
the  old-fashioned  tombstones  would  say.  After- 
ward in  one  of  the  squares  in  the  town  we  saw 
Donna  Francesca  descend  from  a  cab  and  buy  a 
newspaper  at  a  kiosque — an  angular,  thin,  wiry 
person,  moving  with  eledrical  jerks  and  suggest- 
ing a  nature  overcharged  with  nervous  force.  The 
reli6l  was  not  the  wife  of  the  hero's  youth.  His 
love-match  had  been  earlier,  and  the  heroine  of 
it  had  died  before  him. 

Out  beyond  Ardenza,  at  the  very  point  of  the 
promontory,  we  found  the  hamlet  of  Antignano, 
caught  there  like  driftwood  on  a  projecting  rock. 
A  very  humble  folk  loitered  in  the  streets  of  the 

247 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

little  village,  most  of  whom  had  never  seen  any 
greater  place  in  the  world  than  Leghorn.  Mas- 
cagni  is  said  to  have  been  born  there.  One  of  the 
plain,  homely  faces  of  the  young  men  might  well 
enough  have  been  his,  at  that  moment,  if  a  dis- 
cerning patron  had  not  found  out  his  talent  when 
he  was  still  a  boy  and  sent  him  off  to  Milan  to 
develop  it. 

The  drive  back  to  the  hotel  brought  us  into  con- 
tact with  a  breeze  which  had  been  unsuspected  as 
we  went  southward.  The  sun  was  setting  placidly 
without  clouds.  We  watched  from  our  windows, 
after  we  had  regained  our  rooms,  its  final  plunge 
into  the  sea — a  perfedt  disk  shrinking  by  sudden 
subtradions  as  it  settled  out  of  sight. 

In  the  evening  there  was  a  ball,  which  gave  us 
an  opportunity  to  see  one  of  the  charaderistic 
phases  of  the  social  life  of  the  place.  Leghorn 
was  supposed  to  be  a  resort  of  considerable  im- 
portance, to  judge  from  the  daily  reports  of  the 
doings  of  its  summer  colony  which  appeared  in 
the  Roman  papers.  This  particular  festivity  had 
been  heralded  for  several  days  in  advance.  It  per- 
haps showed  the  high-water  mark  of  gaiety  reach- 
able at  this  particular  concentration  of  fashion. 
The  participants  were  almost  exclusively  Italians. 
Other  nationalities  were  represented  only  by  ones 
and  twos. 

Part  of  the  ball  took  possession  of  the  casino 
248 


c  r 


BY  THE  SEA 

on  the  pier  and  part  established  itself  in  the  hotel. 
The  pier  had  a  restaurant,  as  well  as  a  ball-room, 
where  ices  and  iced  beverages  were  dispensed  and 
consumed  in  considerable  quantities,  measured 
by  Italian  standards.  On  the  unenclosed  area  of 
the  pier  there  were  lounging-chairs  in  abundance 
and  the  non-dancers  took  possession  of  them  and 
enjoyed  them.  Were  they  not  more  to  be  envied 
than  the  perspiring  waltzers  who  circled  over  the 
parquet  inside? 

Out  over  the  water  the  view  was  fascinatingly, 
mysteriously  non-existent.  The  night  had  shut  it 
out.  Of  all  that  sparkling  iridescence  of  noonday, 
nothing  remained  visible  except  a  wriggling  line 
of  light,  here  and  there,  traced  on  the  inky  surface 
of  the  water  by  the  distant  gas-jets  on  the  piers. 
One  gazed  out  into  the  soft  void  with  a  sense  of 
infinite  openness  and  space  but  saw  and  heard 
nothing  except  these  quivering  refledions  and  the 
lapping  of  the  water  at  one's  feet. 

Over  at  the  hotel  the  omnipresent  officer  and 
the  ubiquitous  signorina  were  describing  more 
circles  in  the  spacious  salons — which  were  as  com- 
fortable as  the  combination  of  Italy  and  August 
would  permit.  The  civilian  seemed  then,  and 
seems  always,  to  be  at  a  decided  disadvantage  in 
this  military  land,  unless  he  has  a  title  to  com- 
pensate for  the  absence  of  a  uniform.  The  officer 
carries  everything  before  him.  He  is  an  orna- 

249 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

mental  objed:  as  well  as  a  useful  one.  And  his  en- 
forced costume  mercifully  saves  him  from  those 
solecisms  of  dress  toward  which  the  unguided  so 
fatally  gravitate.  He  does  not  combine  russet 
shoes  with  black  evening  clothes,  or  glove  him- 
self in  white  kid  when  his  trousers  are  in  checks, 
or  commit  any  other  of  those  sins  against  the  uni- 
ties of  which  the  civilian  is  so  frequently  guilty. 
The  merit  which  both  the  civilian  and  the  offi- 
cer have  alike  is  the  merit  of  being  good-look- 
ing. Natural  selection  has  done  its  work  in  Italy 
— certainly  in  the  upper  classes.  The  fittest  in 
personal  appearance  has  survived,  and  the  others 
have  been  all  but  effaced  and  exterminated. 

The  talking  side  of  the  ball — for  in  Italy  the 
talkers  often  outnumber  the  dancers — was  a  dis- 
tindly  successful  feature  of  it.  The  dowagers  never 
lacked  for  company.  The  fringe  of  people  around 
the  rooms  was  by  no  means  the  usual  array  of 
bored  on-lookers  found  in  that  place  in  other 
countries.  Indeed  the  charms  of  conversation 
threatened  at  times  to  put  an  end  to  the  legiti- 
mate occupation  of  the  evening  altogether.  None 
of  the  dancers  danced  to  the  end  of  the  measure. 
After  a  turn  or  two  around  the  room  they  usu- 
ally brought  the  exercise  to  a  close  and  drifted 
back  to  the  fauteuils  and  the  sofas  where  mere 
talk  could  be  attended  to  more  effedually.  Such 
vivacity  and  persistency  and  continuity  of  con- 
250 


BY  THE  SEA 

versation  Is  to  be  found  among  no  other  people. 
Even  the  French  do  not  outdo  it.  If  one  is  so 
impertinent  as  to  listen  to  these  dialogues,  it 
sometimes  develops  that  the  talkers  have  noth- 
ing to  say.  But  out  of  this  absence  of  material 
they  effedt  wonders.  The  valueless  substance  is 
beaten  out  like  fine  gold  and  is  made  to  cover 
an  incredible  amount  of  space  with  an  appear- 
ance of  sparkle  and  brilliancy. 

The  ball  came  to  an  end  at  last,  some  time 
well  after  midnight — we  did  not  know  precisely 
when.  And  the  next  day  the  newspapers  said 
much  of  it.  The  costumes  and  the  jewels  were 
described.  The  names  and  the  titles  of  the  par- 
ticipants were  given  at  length.  We  were  made  to 
understand  that  the  occasion  had  been  one  which 
even  for  this  popular  Latin  resort  was  an  unusual 
success.  And  we  accepted  it  definitely,  as  a  type 
of  the  seaside  soiree  dansante  in  its  best  estate. 

Several  days  followed  at  the  shore  which  were 
diversified  with  drives  and  walks  and  explora- 
tions of  the  town  and  its  vicinity.  When  the 
place  had  become  exhausted,  we  abandoned  it 
and  moved  backward  one  stage,  along  our  line 
of  approach,  to  Pisa,  where  a  halt  was  made  and 
where  we  found  sights  to  be  seen  outside  of  the 
narrow  round  known  to  the  tourist.  There  was 
a  Certosa  five  miles  away  almost  as  fine  as  the 
great  one  at  Pavia.  And  there  were  other  places 

251 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

to  be  explored  which  possessed  for  us  the  fasci- 
nation of  belonging  to  the  absolutely  unknown. 

I  add  an  epilogue  to  this  chapter  for  the  sake 
of  speaking  of  one  of  these  unseen  Pisan  sights, 
which  we  investigated  upon  this  particular  visit. 
The  sight  was  the  royal  estate  of  San  Rossore, 
situated  upon  the  outskirts  of  the  town  and  easily 
reachable  by  a  short  drive.  A  permit  was  necessary 
to  admit  one  to  the  place,  but  it  was  furnished  at 
the  Prefedure  on  application.  The  tickets  desig- 
nated it  as  Gli  stahilimenti  della  regia  razza  in 
S.  Rossoj^e,  and  this  being  interpreted  meant  that 
the  domain  was  a  stock-farm,  used  for  the  breed- 
ing of  horses  for  the  royal  stables. 

The  excursion  consumed  perhaps  two  hours. 
There  was  a  mile  or  two  of  level  country  road 
before  one  reached  the  entrance  of  the  estate  and 
after  that  several  miles  of  park-driving  over  well- 
kept  avenues,  with  plenty  of  greensward  and 
magnificent  trees,  before  the  round  had  been  ac- 
complished. 

The  place  was  planned  like  the  French  royal 
demesnes.  Its  long  avenues  suggested  the  broad 
drives  which  cut  through  the  forest  of  Fontaine- 
bleau,  or,  still  more,  those  which  intersed  the 
woodlands  at  Compiegne.  There  would  be  a  road- 
way of  reasonable  width  in  the  middle,  then  a 
wide  belt  of  turf  on  each  side;  and  on  the  outer 
edge  of  the  turf  a  hedge  of  great  trees. 
252 


BY  THE  SEA 

One  rarely  sees  such  fine  trees  in  Italy.  They 
had  large,  bushy,  solid  masses  of  foliage,  and  rose 
to  a  commanding  height.  In  this  land wherewood 
is  scarce,  and  where  the  clearing  of  the  soil  is 
made  necessary  by  the  minute  economy  of  the 
farming  operations,  only  a  prince  could  afford  to 
let  such  masses  of  timber  stand  in  idleness,  con- 
verting the  precious  nutriment  of  the  soil  into 
something  merely  beautiful  to  look  at. 

There  were  occasional  open  spaces  with  stables 
standing  in  the  midst  of  them,  and  plenty  of  the 
regia  razza — the  royal  breed — visible  in  the 
paddocks  around  them.  The  horses  were  in  a 
raw  and  green  state,  and  showed  little  of  their 
real  value.  Much  handling  by  the  trainers  and 
much  grooming  also  would  be  necessary  before 
they  would  look  like  the  fine  beasts  which  draw 
the  red-wheeled  carriages  at  Rome.  But  the  essen- 
tial material  was  there  and  only  needed  polishing 
to  put  it  into  perfed  shape. 

At  the  end  of  the  route  we  came  upon  a  small 
chalet,  a  modest  thing  resembling  a  hunting-lodge, 
which  royalty  had  used  as  a  sleeping-place  in  its  oc- 
casional sojourns  on  the  estate.  And  beyond  this 
lodge  there  was  a  low  mound,  covered  with  grass 
and  fringed  with  trees,  which  closed  the  prosped 
in  thatdiredion.  Impelled  by  a  certain  vague  curi- 
osity, we  left  the  carriage  and  climbed  to  the  sum- 
mit of  this  mound  without  the  slightest  prepara- 

253 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

tion  for  the  prosped  which  awaited  us  on  the  far- 
ther side.  It  was  the  sea.  We  were  in  the  very 
presence  of  it.  The  beach  spread  out  its  zone  of 
yellow  at  our  feet,  and  beyond  it  was  the  wide  blue 
of  the  Mediterranean  going  off  to  the  horizon. 

In  leaving  the  town  we  had  taken  with  us  no 
particular  sense  of  diredion,  but  had  imagined 
that  we  were  driving  inland.  The  sudden  dis- 
covery gave  us  a  sense  of  being  suddenly  wheeled 
around — of  having  the  earth  pivot  beneath  one. 
The  shock  of  orientation  was  something  from 
which  it  required  a  minute  or  two  to  recover. 

The  king  who  came  here  might  have  valued 
the  retreat  for  the  very  reason  of  its  proximity 
to  the  beach.  He  could  have  bathed  here  unob- 
served, a  privilege  which  royalty  rarely  enjoys. 
The  estate  extended  for  miles  on  either  side. 
Not  a  soul  could  enter  the  domain,  without  the 
consent  of  its  owner,  or  come  anywhere  near 
this  protected  spot. 

In  returning  to  the  world  from  this  cut-off 
fragment  of  it,  we  came  upon  a  curious  sight. 
At  a  certain  point  while  we  were  still  on  the 
royal  estate,  a  train  of  camels  passed  us. 

The  vision  of  these  strange  beasts  gave  us 
another  moment  of  bewildered  geography,  as 
they  first  came  into  sight  some  distance  ahead. 
Were  we  in  our  senses — or  was  this  some  mirage 
of  the  desert? 
254 


BY  THE  SEA 

We  were  in  our  senses.  It  was  no  mirage. 
The  awkward,  sprawling  creatures  were  coming 
steadily  and  surely  toward  us,  with  that  peculiar 
ducking  motion  which  is  theirs  and  theirs  alone. 

The  little  Pisan  cabman,  who  was  conducing 
our  vehicle,  turned  out  from  the  road  at  the 
proper  moment  and  took  his  station  beside  it. 
Then  he  turned  around  to  devour  our  surprise. 

"What  are  these  creatures,  Nicolo?"  we  asked, 
still  doubting  our  senses.  "Are  they — can  they 
be—*' 

"They  are  camels,  signori,"  returned  the 
brown-faced  Tuscan,  with  a  gleam  of  satisfac- 
tion at  our  proper  wonderment.  "It  is  a  strange 
beast.  They  grow  in  the  East.  They  are  not  na- 
tives here." 

The  strange  beasts  came  nearer.  They  seemed 
to  be  carrying  burdens.  Boxes  were  hung  on 
either  side  of  their  humps  like  the  packs  of  a 
mule. 

"What  are  they  carrying,  Nicolo?" 

"It  is  earth,  signori.  These  beasts  are  used 
here  for  mending  the  roads.  They  carry  the 
burdens  for  the  workmen.  They  are  useful  here 
on  the  estate,  but  they  never  leave  it." 

"Why  do  they  never  leave  it?" 

"They  have  tender  feet,  signori.  They  wear 
no  irons.  On  the  pavements  they  would  suffer. 
In  their  own  home  where  they  come  from  there 

255 


THE  LAND  OF  THE  LATINS 

is  nothing  but  sand.  Here  on  these  soft  roads 
and  on  the  turf  they  are  useful.  But  they  never 
leave  the  estate." 

"Who  ever  thought  of  bringing  them  here?" 

"It  was  the  Medici,  signori.  These  camels 
were  given  to  them  by  the  Turk."  He  brought 
his  explanation  to  an  end,  but  the  next  moment 
was  seized  with  a  sudden  misgiving.  "Not  these 
very  camels,  signori. Oh, no!  These  beasts  would 
not  have  lived  as  long  as  that.  It  was  the  fathers 
and  the  mothers  of  them.  It  was  some  time  ago." 

We  looked  respectfully  at  these  descendants 
of  an  ancient  race.  Our  own  pedigree  was  recent 
and  contemptible  in  comparison.  The  procession 
passed  us  in  dignified  silence.  Their  advance  was 
as  rhythmic  and  as  regular  as  the  swaying  of 
pendulums. 

Nicolo  turned  back  into  the  avenue  and  his 
white  horse  trotted  merrily  toward  the  gate.  There 
were  no  more  incidents.  At  the  Pisan  station  our 
highland  train  was  waiting;  and  in  an  hour  or 
two  more  we  were  back  upon  our  Tuscan  height. 


HISTORY  OF 
MODERN   ITALIAN  ART 

BY  ASHTON  ROLLINS  WILLARD 

With  Frontispiece  in  Photogravure  and 
Thirty-nine  Plates  in  Half-tone 

Second  Edition.  With  a  Supplement  to  the  'Text 
( 12^  pages)  and  Additional  Illustrations.  In  ^vo^ 
pp.  xvi-{-ji2'  Cloth^  Gilt  Top.  Price,  I5.00. 

THIS  book  completes  the  record  of  Italian 
Art,  bridging  over  the  gap  between  the  his- 
toric period,  so  called,  and  the  present  time.  It  is 
particularly  full  on  the  subjedl  of  contemporary 
artists.  Through  his  personal  acquaintance  with 
leading  Italian  painters  and  sculptors  and  with 
Italian  authorities  on  modern  art,  the  author  has 
been  able  to  give  his  work  accuracy  and  com- 
pleteness. The  illustrations  include  reproductions 
of  the  best  work  of  the  leading  artists. 

CONTENTS 

PART  I.  SCULPTURE.  Chapter  I.  — The  Revival 
of  the  Classic  Style  by  Canova  and  his  Contemporaries. 
Chapter  II.  —  Lorenzo  Bartolini,  the  Leader  of  the  Re- 
aftion  against  Classicism.  Chapter  IIL  —  The  Transition 
from  Classicism  to  Naturalism.  Chapter  IV.  —  The  De- 
velopment of  Naturalism  in  the  Work  of  Vincenzo  Vela. 
Chapter  V.  —  Recent  Sculptors  of  Southern  Italy.  Chap- 
ter VI. —  Recent  Sculptors  of  Central  Italy.  Chapter  VII. 
—  Recent  Sculptors  of  Northern  Italy. 


MODERN  ITALIAN  ART 

CONTENTS CONTINUED 

PART  II.  PAINTING.  Chapter  VIII.— Vinccnzo 
Camuccini,  the  Leading  Painter  of  the  Classic  Movement. 
Chapter  IX.  —  Other  Classic  Painters.  Chapter  X.  —  Pre- 
Raphaelitism  and  Romanticism.  Chapter  XI.  —  Other 
Phases  of  the  Reaction  against  Classicism.  Chapter  XII. — 
The  Leaders  of  the  Modern  Neapolitan  School.  Chapter 
XIII.  —  Recent  Painters  of  Southern  Italy.  Chapter  XIV. 
—  Recent  Painters  of  Central  Italy.  Chapter  XV.  —  Recent 
Painters  of  Northern  Italy. 

PART  III.  ARCHITECTURE.  Chapter  XVL  — Ar- 
chitefts  of  the  Classic  Movement,  and  their  Contempora- 
ries and  Successors.  Chapter  XVII.  —  Recent  Architefts. 
SUPPLEMENT  — INDEX. 

NOTICES 

"The  volume  entire  is  a  monument  of  intelligent  indus- 
try and  comprehensive  research  much  to  be  valued."  — 
Times,  New  York. 

"He  has  the  field  pradically  to  himself  and  it  will  hardly 
pay  another  to  glean  where  he  has  reaped." — The  Critic, 
New  York, 

"Altogether,  the  volume  is  one  of  remarkable  interest."  — 
The  Transcript,  Boston. 

"As  a  reference  book  for  the  general  reader  the  volume  can- 
not fail  of  permanent  value."  —  Literary  World,  Boston. 

"One  feels  that  it  says  the  last  as  well  as  the  first  word  on 
the  subjeft." — Mail  and  Express,  New  York. 

"Mr.  Willard  has  admirably  presented  the  art-history  of 
modern  Italy."  —  Press,  Philadelphia. 

"The  book  is  from  beginning  to  end  graphic  and  interest- 


MODERN  ITALIAN  ART 

ing.  Its  artistic  discussions  are  critical  and  penetrating."  — 
New  England  Magazine. 

"The  amount  of  work  that  the  book  represents  is  tremen- 
dous."—  The  Courant,  Hartford. 

"Contains  far  more  information  about  the  Italian  artists  of 
this  century  than  any  other  that  exists  in  English." — The 
Times ^  London. 

"A  work  which  one  reads  with  pleasure  and  with  profit." 
—  Rivista  d'  Italia^  Rome. 

"The  author  fills  up,  for  the  first  time  and  in  an  admirable 
manner,  a  serious  gap  in  our  art-history."  —  Illustrazione, 
Milan. 

"An  honest  and  original  work,  the  result  of  first-hand  re- 
search."—  Magazine  of  Art,  London. 

"A  history  which,  if  it  contains  here  and  there  a  hasty 
judgment,  strikes  us  as,  on  the  whole,  spirited,  accurate, 
and  just."  —  Literature,  London. 

"Deals  with  each  branch  of  art  in  an  informatory  and  ex- 
haustive spirit." — The  Studio,  London. 

"Mr.  Willard's  book  on  modern  Italian  art  is  a  grand  book 
and  delights  me.  If  I  were  a  reviewer  it  would  receive  un- 
hesitating and  warm  acknowledgment  of  its  value,  for  I 
like  it  through  and  through,  and,  moreover,  think  the  sub- 
je6l  one  of  very  great  interest  and  importance."  —  Sir  Wyke 
Bayliss,  Pres.  of  the  Royal  Society  of  British  Artists. 

"Your  book  is  the  first  one  which  has  been  dedicated  in 
a  foreign  language  to  contemporary  Italian  art,  and  it  is  not 
only  important  for  its  comprehensiveness,  but  is  also  ren- 
dered remarkable  by  the  manner  in  which  the  subjeft  is 
developed.  I  congratulate  you  particularly  upon  its  con- 


MODERN  ITALIAN  ART 

stru£tion,  that  is  to  say,  the  arrangement  and  distribution 
of  the  matter ;  what  one  calls  the  architefture  of  a  book, 
something  which  is  very  difficult  and  at  the  same  time  of 
the  very  greatest  importance." —  Giulio  Carotti,  Secretary  of 
the  Royal  Academy^  Milan. 

LONGMANS,  GREEN  AND  CO. 

New  York,  London,  and  Bombay 


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